After a fair hotel breakfast, the morning took us on a
short drive to New Hampshire’s only National Park site. Forget the grand vistas or peaceful fields
that once hosted death. Nah. Let’s talk
art.
Augustus Saint-Gaudens (GO-dins) is considered one of
America’s greatest sculptors and, in my opinion, bore a striking and eerie
resemblance to Dustin Diamond from “Saved by the Bell.” (If Diamond ever gets his life out of the
toilet, maybe he can be cast in a biopic of Saint-Gauden’s life.) If you
have ever held American coins or walked through any number of art institutes
across the world, you have seen his work or the work of his students.
Born in 1848 in Dublin, he was raised in New York only to
return to Europe as a young man to gain further study in sculpture. Returning to New York again, he went on to
receive a commission for the Admiral David Farragut statue that cemented his
reputation as a sculptor on a world level.
Like so many artists, once you get that first piece out of the way,
people will line up to have you do more.
His Standing Lincoln, William Tecumseh Sherman, Diana,
the Puritan and the Adams Memorial are just some of the works he churned out in
his lifetime.
As a Civil War nut, I found myself in awe of the Shaw Memorial when I was in Boston Common a few years back. Low and behold, he did
that, too. Completed in the blazing fast
timeline of 14 years (the same amount of time it will take the Republicans to
field a good Presidential candidate), it is considered one of his greatest
pieces and, by some, one of the greatest public monuments ever made. The model of the grounds here in New
Hampshire was much smaller than the 11’ by 14’ original cast in
Massachusetts.
If you are not familiar with who Robert Gould Shaw was,
go ask Mathew Broderick. He portrayed him in what has to be one of the best
Civil War movies ever made – Glory. The
Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor that year went to DenzelWashington. Plus Morgan Freeman? Really. Go see this movie.
However, for the layperson, Saint-Gaudens greatest
contributions to American culture might be his work with coins. A numismatist
(say that 10 times fast!), he was invited to develop new coins for the US
Treasury by President Teddy Roosevelt.
His Double Eagle $20 coin is thought by many to be one of the most
beautiful coins ever made. The original
version, stuck 11 times to ensure maximum detail, can sell for over 2 million
dollars at auction. The fact that only
20 were made might influence that number, huh? This Ultra High Relief was not
circulated as it was discovered that it did not stack well! A “squished
version” of the coin (if I can use advanced vocabulary) was finally minted from
1907 to 1933.
But his efforts
with coins did not stop there. A
celebrated teacher, he used his home in Cornish, New Hampshire (the now
National Park site) as a studio and school for students of sculpture. The famous Buffalo Nickel and the Washington
Quarter (the very same one that is possibly in your couch, creating that
clunking sound in your dryer or gummed into the cup holder of your car) were
designed by his students.
The opportunity
to visit this site was basically the only site-seeing opportunity of the day.
After zipping through a covered bridge, we pressed on for the six hour drive to
eastern central Pennsylvania. The GPS had
us perilously close to New York City (within 80 miles or so) so traffic was a
bit thick at times and quite the contrast from rural Maine. At one point, we were in New Jersey. I’m still trying to get my IQ points
back. They got sucked out of my head
when we crossed the state line.
Lodging was a
tent site in the Blue Rocks Family Campground.
While our original thoughts suggested this would be the dreaded KOA
clone with game rooms, swimming pools, screaming kids, RVs up the ying-yang and
preposterous tenting options, we were mostly….right. All were true except the camping.
We found
ourselves on a pleasant wooded hilltop site easily 50 yards from the next tent
and well beyond the hubbub and chaos below.
Nice. We might as well have had
to the woods to ourselves. We did share
it with a Scarlet Tanager. He
“chick-burr”-ed his way into the sunset.
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