William Tecumseh Sherman

When he sat for Saint-Gaudens, three years before the end of his life, William Tecumseh Sherman had been a soldier in the Mexican War, a banker, a military academy administrator, a renowned Union General, and the commander of the United States Army under President Ulysses S. Grant from 1869 to 1883. Most famously, during the American Civil War, Sherman conducted the infamous "March to the Sea" through Tennessee and Georgia in 1864-65. This bloody but effective campaign cut the Confederacy in half and enabled a Union victory, becoming the stuff of military, historical, and cultural legend. Sherman's notoriously irascible personality and strong will are apparent in this vividly carved bust, modeled by Saint-Gaudens in about eighteen sittings lasting two hours each. The artist, an acclaimed late nineteenth-century sculptor, had studied and lived in Europe, particularly Rome, before triumphantly returning to the United States. At almost the same moment he was completing Sherman's bust, Saint-Gaudens was embarking upon several of the public memorials in New York and Boston that would earn him lasting fame. Saint-Gaudens later designed a memorial to Sherman in New York's Grand Army Plaza, completed in 1903. The Academy's plaster bust was made for one of the general's daughters.