NEW BOOK: STAN AND GUS

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V29 2026 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 29, Number 17, 2026, Article 3

At our Nummis Nova meeting this week, John Kraljevich tipped me off to a recently published book the famed sculptor and coin designer Augustus Saint-Gaudens. I ordered a copy and it arrived Friday. -Editor

Stan and Gus: Art, Ardor, and the Friendship That Built the Gilded Age
by Henry Wiencek

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.

Here's an excerpt from a New York Times review. There's no shortage of racy passages. -Editor

A bombastic Puck with a cartoonishly large mustache, White (1853-1906) apprenticed as a teenager to the great American revivalist of Romanesque architecture, Henry Hobson Richardson, then became a founding partner in New York's enormously influential firm McKim, Mead & White, where he deployed his cannonball speed and lack of filter, his genius with interiors, surface detail and historical collage.

White could extract something oddly American-feeling from ancient Italy, as he did with the Washington Square Arch; or from ancien régime France, with a Gatsby-grade Rhode Island manor; or from Golden Age Spain, as with the electric-lit pleasure palace of the second Madison Square Garden, on which Wiencek opens and closes his chronicle of decadence.

Through collaborations like this, including a tomb for the former New York governor Edwin D. Morgan (now lost) and the nude Diana weather vane for Madison Square Garden (versions of which live at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art), White propelled Saint-Gaudens to the top of his craft. He won him commissions and improvised excuses for the crippling perfectionism — what Saint-Gaudens called his "idiotic delicacy" — that delayed their deadlines by years, sometimes past clients' deaths. "Never did an artist have a more devoted agent," Wiencek ventures.

Their friendship was also sexual, though Wiencek, a journalist and historian specializing in the founding era, doesn't trade in sensationalism. Instead, he uses the surviving erotic notes between the two men — "Darling, once more and for the 5,999th time you can kiss me," Saint-Gaudens assured White in one sign-off — to explore their bond. (The partnership so dictates the book that certain groundbreaking solo jobs, like Saint-Gaudens's $20 coin for the U.S. Mint, are breezed over.)

The pair's social circles, too, were like Venn diagrams of bodily and aesthetic freedom: One shared spot was the Sewer Club, which Wiencek diplomatically calls "a safe space for sexual adventuring" with the painter Thomas Dewing, the architect Joseph Wells and other luminaries.

Wives paid a price. The long-suffering Augusta Saint-Gaudens eventually learned about her sculptor husband's illegitimate son by his model for the Diana, Davida Clark. Bessie White got even for Stanford's compulsive dalliances by bedding his lawyer.