Saint-Gaudens’ Model

Few would deny that Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ gold double eagle is one of the most attractive coins ever minted.

Cornelius Vermeule, in his seminal Numismatic Art in America, termed it, “perhaps the most majestic coin ever to bear our national imprint.”¹

Few would deny that Saint-Gaudens was one of the nation’s most accomplished sculptors.

John H. Dryfhout, in A Master of American Sculpture, succinctly recorded, “Augustus Saint-Gaudens has been described as an American

Michelangelo, a superb craftsman, a poet and philosopher, who fitted America as Michelangelo had been suited to the Florentine and Roman scenes.”²

But equally few would find such unambiguous clarity when in comes to who modeled for his majestic gold double eagle (1907-1933) – some claim it was Mary Cunningham, whose classic features immediately enchanted him; or Davida Clark, the model for his renowned Diana; or Alice Butler, a local Vermont girl thought by some to have been his Victory.

Thanks to research by William E. Hagans, first appearing in Numismatic News, Hettie E. Anderson, an African American woman, is now most often credited. Anderson, a New York model, known to some as Saint-Gaudens’ model, posed for the Victory of New York’s Sherman Monument and was most likely the woman with “negro blood in her veins” referred to by Saint-Gaudens’ son, Homer Saint-Gaudens, in his scattershot retellings of how the Saint-Gaudens coins came to be.³

Now, more than two decades after Hagans’ award-winning article, “Author contends black lady modeled for double eagle,” was published in the Feb. 26, 1991 issue of Numismatic News, Willow Hagans and Eve M. Kahn have brought to light new biographical information on Anderson that helps paint a broader picture of her successful career.

How that came to be is the story not only of Anderson’s acclaim among sculptors and artists of her day, but also of a true American master craftsman, his rise to fame, accompanied by ever-increasing commissions, and an early 20th century desire for new coinage designs that the perpetrators of hoped would rival the breathtaking high-relief, hand-created masterpieces of ancient Greece.

Saint-Gaudens, Master Sculptor

Augustus Saint-Gaudens was born on March 1, 1848, in Dublin, Ireland, to Bernard and Mary (McGuiness) Saint-Gaudens, the family emigrating to the United States shortly after his birth, when his parents fled the Irish potato famine. Arriving in Boston in September 1848 among a veritable wave of Irish immigrants escaping the blight, the