Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: n A NEW YORK DECADE 1857-1867 American Art Previous to 1848—The Fork in the Road—The Merit in Rigorous Training—Apprenticed to Avet—The First Appreciation of Country—New York in Wartime—Discharged by Avet— A Kinder Master—Hard Work in the Cooper Institute—The Night in the Cell—The National Academy of Design—The Draft Riots —Lincoln's Assassination—More Lady Loves—Preparations for Europe. IN his autobiography, Augustus Saint-Gaudens continues to speak of his boyhood, but, from the opening of the chapter, his attitude toward his surroundings alters. His school-days end, and the engrossing work of his life begins with his apprenticeship to the cameo-cutter, Avet. The impulse which caused him to seek such an occupation sprang from the very center of his being. Often in after years he would say that no one ever succeeded in art unless born with an uncontrollable instinct toward it. This instinct in him must have been of the strongest to survive its surroundings, since his family lacked artistic leanings, and the young Republic to which he had been brought was only slowly feeling its way along paths of artistic development. Painting formed the basis of the arts of design yet, from the years of its first real activity, it had scarcely fallen to a lower ebb than in 1848, when it had broken away from the ideals and methods borrowed from English models by such men as Copley and Stuart in the Colonial period, and yet had not come to its own truly national expression through the "Hudson River School" of landscape artists. If a depressing condition of affairs was characteristic of painting, the outlook for sculptors proved still more thoroughly unsatisfactory, with its difficult medium and fewer practitioners. For though Copley and West and Stuart made their names known ab... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.