“I should like to be a genius,” the artist and diplomat Maitland Armstrong wrote in 1899, pondering the shrouded statue that the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens had placed at the grave of Marian “Clover” Hooper Adams, in Rock Creek Cemetery, in Washington, D.C., at a site designed by the architect Stanford White. It was part of a chorus of admiration and consternation brought on by the ambiguous, androgynous figure—a statue marked by an “absence of Christian joy or hope,” yet charged with some other, ineffable feeling, Henry Wiencek writes in Stan and Gus: Art, Ardor, and the Friendship That Built the Gilded Age.
In 1890, while work on the tomb was still underway, the man who had commissioned it, Clover Adams’s widower, Henry Adams, had a different outlook on the artistic spirit of its creators. “If I could,” he wrote, “I should club St Gaudens and Stanford White and put them under their own structure.” Before Adams could end up visiting the finished memorial “almost daily” and writing to Saint-Gaudens to marvel at the statue’s mystery, he first had to endure nearly five years of false starts, evasions, and excuses from the duo.
