Author: Augustus Saint-Gaudens
Augustus Saint-Gaudens' Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Regiment
National Gallery of Art
2010
Format: PDF
Pages: 16
Size: 14 Mb
Language: English
On July 18, 1863, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw was killed while leading the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Volunteer Infantry in a bloody assault on Fort Wagner, near Charleston, South Carolina. The defeat was an event of powerful symbolic significance for one of the first African-American units of the Civil War. Thirty-four years later Augustus Saint-Gaudens created perhaps the finest sculpture of his career, memorializing Shaw and the Fifty-fourth.