Frances Folsom Cleveland

1887–92, cast 1902
Not on view
Saint-Gaudens began modelling a low-relief portrait of Frances Folsom Cleveland (1864-1947), wife of President Grover Cleveland, while both were guests at the summer home of Helena and Richard Gilder in Marion, Massachusetts, in August 1887, completing the seventeen-inch medallion in 1892. It depicts Frances Cleveland one year after her marriage to the President, at age twenty-three, wearing an upswept hairstyle and a fashionable, high-collared dress. In late 1901, Saint-Gaudens reduced the scale of the plaster medallion to five-and-a-half inches in diameter, and early in 1902 he cast it in bronze and presented this example to Richard Gilder as a birthday present.

Artwork Details

Object Information
  • Title: Frances Folsom Cleveland
  • Artist: Augustus Saint-Gaudens (American, Dublin 1848–1907 Cornish, New Hampshire)
  • Date: 1887–92, cast 1902
  • Medium: Bronze
  • Dimensions: Diameter: 5 1/2 in. (14 cm)
  • Credit Line: Friends of the American Wing Fund, 2008
  • Object Number: 2008.156
  • Curatorial Department: The American Wing

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Augustus Saint-Gaudens - Frances Folsom Cleveland - The Metropolitan Museum of Art