![]() A new exhibition looks more closely at what is considered one of the first great masterpieces of American sculpture, focusing not just on the heroic figure of Shaw, but on the anonymous African American figures behind him. Since 1997, the National Gallery of Art has held a version of the Saint-Gaudens memorial, made of plaster coated to look like metal, and created after the bronze monument that stands on the edge of the Boston Common. ![]() We know exactly what he looked like from a photograph, showing him seated at a table, with a wispy mustache and one hand draped almost languidly into his lap. Robert Gould Shaw, who led the regiment into a maelstrom of Confederate fire 150 years ago this summer, was ÂHarvard-educated and came from an elite family of Boston abolitionists. ![]() ![]() The central figure in Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s monument to the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the first African American troop to fight in the Union army, is a handsome young white man whose uniform is straining at the buttons over his strongly built figure. ![]()
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