Augustus Saint-Gaudens' Diana

 

#WCE1893

Some things survived the Fair, though not always in the best of conditions. Such a case is Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Diana. He was the head of sculpture for the Fair, but he wasn’t going to have his own work in the fair--until he had to find a new home for a truly colossal work of art. His good friend Stanford White, whose firm, McKim, Mead, and White designed Madison Square Garden, commissioned a weathervane in the shape of Diana to perch on top of the tower. Saint-Gaudens found a lithesome model for the body (I sincerely hope she didn’t have to stand on tiptoe the whole time). Her step looks light, but she weighed in at a whopping 1,800 pounds and was 18 feet tall.

She was installed in 1891, but it was quickly clear that she was too heavy to turn in the wind and too large for the tower—and definitely too large to be that naked. Arthur Comstock and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice went on a crusade against her indecency. On the other hand, many New Yorkers affectionately dubbed her “Diana of the Tower.” White and Saint-Gaudens decided that maybe Diana should be replaced with a smaller version, Diana 2.0. But what to do with Diana 1.0? Saint-Gaudens had a great idea. She could go on top of the Women’s Building. There were just two problems: the Women’s Building did not have a pinnacle or a dome for Diana to stand on and Francis Willard, president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and member of the Board of Lady Managers for the Fair, strongly objected. This is usually described as a bit of prudish Comstockery, but the women were fighting tooth and nail for respect and the ability to define themselves as real women. Everything in and out of the building was the work of women. They did not want to be represented as titillating deities objectified by male artists. 

McKim, Mead, and White were the architects for the Agriculture Building. She could go on the dome and reign over the south side of the Court of Honor. New York, which had lost the rights to host the Fair and now lost Diana, was a bit grumpy. The New York Times music critic, W. J. Henderson, memorialized the occasion in a long poem “To Diana Off the Tower” which includes these immortal lines

And in the temple men will drop a tear,

And seek surcease of sorrow in cold beer.

…

For poised aloft in the transparent air

She’ll typify to all Chicago’s fair.

Great Diana in the boundless west!

I hope they’ll buy her a new flannel vest,

For there, rude Boreas is at his best.

Another New Yorker, Granville Sharpe, made her a central figure in a short story called “A Goddess in a Fog” and lamented her going to where she might not be appreciated:“Diana’s reign was over, but I still believe in her power, not withstanding that certain residents of the World’s Fair city have refused since then, to accept my golden goddess within their sacred precincts, on account of the scantiness of her attire!”

The scale of the Agriculture Building suited her well. The Official Guide gushed that she turned at “the lightest zephyr” and had “singular grace,” but I haven’t found any other account that she managed to move in the wind. 

The glittering metal was particularly striking at night when the light show turned on, as Julian Hawthorne (Nathaniel’s son) tried to describe: “On the dome of this building stands the golden Diana, ravished from the tower of the New York Madison Garden: at her feet was a ring of lamps, which cast a gleam upwards over her graceful figure…. From various high coignes of vantage the long, keen rays of search-lights struck across the dark, and lit upon the golden Diana on her dome.”

Meanwhile, back in New York City, Saint-Gaudens made a smaller, lighter Diana 2.0 for the tower of Madison Square Garden, where she stood until the McKim, Mead, and White Garden was torn down.

After that, Diana 2.0 went to Philadelphia. Diana of the Tower was so popular, that Saint-Gaudens started to make smaller copies to sell, so if you Google Diana and Saint-Gaudens you can see her in many incarnations, though her billowing cloak is gone.

As for Diana 1.0, she stayed atop the Agriculture Building after the Fair closed in October 1893, waiting while the Board of Manager dithered about what to do with the remnants of the Fair. And there she perched when the Court of Honor was engulfed in flames that cold winter of 1894. The fire was so intense that much of Diana melted. For a while, the remains were kept in the basement of the Field Columbian Museum (now MSI). Then, in 1909, she suddenly reappeared in public on the steps of the Art Institute, aiming her bow up Adams. 

This did not make people happy. The August 19, 1909, Chicago Daily Tribune referred to her as “Diana in the wash tub:” “The untutored host want to know how far Diana extends into the tub and whether she is on her knees… also who grafted the gold colored mustard plaster of new skin over the great wound in her tum tum. The incision appears to have been repaired by a boilermaker rather than the skilled surgeon of clay, Saint-Gaudens. This is surely not the Diana of the Greeks, and we hope, not the Chicagoans.”

Diana stayed out there a couple of years, as far as I can tell. I did find a reference to her moving to the Field Museum, but there’s no reference to her still surviving that I’ve found yet. You can always go visit her many siblings, however, including Diana 2.0 in Philadelphia, who very recently got a new layer of gold, which probably gives a sense of just how shiny she was in 1893.