Francis Davis Millet

Between 1877 and 1880, Saint-Gaudens completed around twenty informal, low-relief portraits of artists and friends, many of whom were part of his intertwined social and professional orbits. He collaborated on civic projects with New York architects Charles McKim and Stanford White, painted murals in Boston’s Trinity Church with Francis Davis Millet, co-founded the Society of American Artists in 1877 with Helena de Kay, and enjoyed critical praise from journalist Richard Watson Gilder. The reliefs reveal the sculptor’s preference for shoulder-length profile portraits with personalized inscriptions and attributes, a format he also adapted to commissioned likenesses, such as the bronze of collector and tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s sons.