Charles F. McKim, Stanford White, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens

In summer 1878 Saint-Gaudens and the architects Stanford White (1853-1906) and Charles McKim (1847-1909) departed from Paris for an eleven-day holiday to central and southern France. Soon thereafter Saint-Gaudens fashioned this sketchy, lighthearted medallion as a souvenir for the trio, replete with reminders of the trip. White’s leonine features appear at the top, with McKim’s balding compacted head at the right and Saint-Gaudens’s angular profile at the left. Around the rough edge are shorthand notations of the towns they visited while in the center appear the tools of their trades: sculptor’s mallet and architect’s dividers and T-square, as well as miniature representations of Claus Sluter’s Moses Fountain near Dijon and the twelfth-century Romanesque church at Saint-Gilles. This cast originally belonged to White.