Frances Folsom Cleveland

Augustus Saint-Gaudens

1887–92, cast 1902 · Bronze · The American Wing

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.

Artist

Augustus Saint-Gaudens

Date

1887–92, cast 1902

Medium

Bronze

Department

The American Wing

Credit line

Friends of the American Wing Fund, 2008