"Amor Caritas" by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, cast in bronze after 1898. Cleveland Museum of Art.

This is the second of these I've photographed.

Funerary winged angels are a recurring theme in the work of Saint-Gaudens, the most famous American sculptor of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The model was Davida Johnson Clark, Saint-Gaudens' mistress since the early 1880s. A garland of passion flowers encircles her waist and adorns her hair (in a Christ-like rather than funereal manner). It is based on a slightly different design that was 10 feet high and carved in marble in 1880 for the tomb of Edwin D. Morgan in Hartford, Connecticut. Three angels were carved for that work, but the tomb was destroyed by fire and the artworks lost. Saint-Gaudens then carved the image again in marble and created two of them as caryatids for the fireplace mantelpiece in the mansion of Cornelius Vanderbilt II. These are now on display in the East Gallery of the American Wing Courtyard of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Saint-Gaudens carved it yet again for the tomb of Ann Maria Smith in Island Cemetery, Newport, Rhode Island.

After Saint-Gaudens returned to Paris in 1897, he reworked the figure into a bronze sculpture. He made changes to the wings and garment, made the tablet smaller, got rid of a cornice (since it would no longer hold up mantels or roofs), and added a semicircular plinth below the feeth. He cast the eight-foot-high original in bronze in 1898.

"Amor Caritas" is one of the major works of American sculpture. It won Saint-Gaudens the Grand Prix of the Exhibition Universelle in Paris in 1900.

After the work became universally praised, Saint-Gaudens began casting 40-inch-high versions. Wood framed versions are common, but many are stand-alone pieces. A few are gilded. Copies are held by the Art Institute of Chicago, Brooklyn Museum, Cincinnati Art Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), Custis Memorial Library (Meriden, Connecticut), Detroit Institute of Arts, Massachusetts General Hospital, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City), R.W. Norton Gallery (Shreveport, Louisiana), Rhode Island School of Design, St. Louis Art Museum, and the University of Miami Library. At least one is in private hands.