The time of Saint-Gaudens’s study in Paris was a time of great importance in the development of modern sculpture, and, although Jouffroy was not himself a sculptor of the highest rank, his studio was a centre for what was then the new movement in the sculpture of France.  The essential thing in this movement was the abandoning of the formal imitation of second-rate antiques and the substitution of the sculpture of the Italian Renaissance as a source of inspiration and of the direct study of nature as a means of self-expression.  There had always been individual sculptors of power and originality in France, but the movement of the French school of sculpture, as a whole, away from the pseudo classicism which had long dominated it was really inaugurated by Paul Dubois only a few years before Saint-Gaudens’s arrival in Paris.  Many of the men destined to a brilliant part in the history of modern sculpture were trained in the atelier of Jouffroy.  Falguiere and Saint-Marceau had but just left that studio when the young American entered it, and Mercie was his fellow student there.  Dalou and Rodin have since made these men seem old-fashioned and academic, but they were then, and for many years afterward, the heads of the new school; and of this new school, so different from anything he had known in America, Saint-Gaudens inevitably became a part.  His own pronounced individuality, and perhaps his comparative isolation during the years of his greatest productivity, gave his art a character of its own, unlike any other, but to the French school of sculpture of the third quarter of the nineteenth century he essentially belonged.

Of course, his style was not formed in a moment.  His “Hiawatha” seems, to-day, much such a piece of neo-classicism as was being produced by other men in the Rome of that time, and the “Silence,” though somewhat more modern in accent, is an academic work such as might have been expected from a docile pupil of his master.  The relief of angels for the reredos of Saint Thomas’s Church is the earliest important work which shows his personal manner.  It was undertaken in collaboration with John La Farge, and perhaps the influence of La Farge, and of that eminently picturesque genius Stanford White, mingled with that of the younger French school in forming its decorative and almost pictorial character.  It was a kind of improvisation, done at prodigious speed and without study from nature—­a sketch rather than a completed work of art, but a sketch to be slowly developed into the reliefs of the Farragut pedestal, the angels of the Morgan tomb, the caryatids of the Vanderbilt mantelpiece, and, at length, into such a masterpiece as the “Amor-Caritas.”  In each of these developments the work becomes less picturesque and more formal, the taste is purified, the exuberance of decorative feeling is more restrained.  The final term is reached in the caryatids for the Albright Gallery at Buffalo—­works of his last days, when his hands were no longer able to shape the clay, yet essentially his though he never touched them; works of an almost austere nobility of style, the most grandly monumental figures he ever produced.