A01=Henry Wiencek
American Renaissance
architect
architecture
art world
Augustus Saint-Gaudens
Author_Henry Wiencek
Category=AGA
Category=AGB
Category=AJCD
Category=AMB
Category=DNB
Category=DNBF
Category=JBSJ
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
friendship
Gilded Age
partnership
sculptor
sculpture
Stanford White
Product details
- ISBN 9780374162498
- Weight: 430g
- Dimensions: 140 x 215mm
- Publication Date: 18 Aug 2025
- Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Stanford White was a louche man-about-town and a canny cultural entrepreneur - the creator of landmark buildings that elevated American architecture to new heights. Augustus Saint-Gaudens was the son of an immigrant shoemaker, a moody introvert, and a committed procrastinator whose painstaking work brought emotional depth to American sculpture. They met when Stan was walking down the street and heard Gus whistling Mozart in his studio. They pursued their own careers in Italy and France, then came together again in New York, where they maintained an intimate friendship and partnership that defined the art of the Gilded Age. Over the course of decades, White would help sustain his friend's troubled spirits and vouch for Saint-Gaudens when he failed to complete projects. Meanwhile, Saint-Gaudens would challenge White to take his artistic gifts seriously - and so it went amid brilliant commissions and sordid debaucheries all the way to White’s sensational murder by an enraged husband in 1906.
In Stan and Gus, the acclaimed historian Henry Wiencek sets the two men’s relationship within the larger story of the American Renaissance, where millionaires’ commissions and delusions of grandeur collided with secret upper-class clubs, new aesthetic ideas, and two ambitious young men to yield work of lasting beauty.
Henry Wiencek, a nationally prominent historian and writer, is the author of several books, including The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1999; An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Award; and Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
