DC -- Natl Gallery of Art -- West Wing -- Building:
Bruce Guthrie Photos Home Page: [Click here] to go to Bruce Guthrie Photos home page.
Recognize anyone? If you recognize specific folks (or other stuff) and I haven't labeled them, please identify them for the world. Click the little pencil icon underneath the file name (just above the picture). Spammers need not apply.
Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
Accessing as Spider: The system has identified your IP as being a spider. IP Address: 18.232.66.188 -- Domain: Amazon Technologies
I love well-behaved spiders! They are, in fact, how most people find my site. Unfortunately, my network has a limited bandwidth and pictures take up bandwidth. Spiders ask for lots and lots of pages and chew up lots and lots of bandwidth which slows things down considerably for regular folk. To counter this, you'll see all the text on the page but the images are being suppressed. Also, some system options like merges are being blocked for you.
Note: Permission is NOT granted for spiders, robots, etc to use the site for AI-generation purposes. I'm sure you're thrilled by your ability to make revenue from my work but there's nothing in that for my human users or for me.
If you are in fact human, please email me at guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can check if your designation was made in error. Given your number of hits, that's unlikely but what the hell.
Help? The Medium (Email) links are for screen viewing and emailing. You'll want bigger sizes for printing. [Click here for additional help]
Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
NGABLD_970805_01.JPG: Natl Gallery of Art; West Wing; Shaw Memorial; overall
The Shaw Memorial commemorates Robert Shaw, who led a colored regiment from Boston whose members were mostly freed blacks and included two songs of Frederick Douglass. Shaw and much of the regiment was killed in an assault on Fort Wagner in South Carolina in 1863. Money was raised for a memorial on Morris Island but it was never built.
In the 1880's, Augustus Saint-Gaudens was contacted about creating a memorial in Boston itself. By the end of 1883, he had produced numerous drawings and clay models and a contract was signed in Feb 1884. Originally, a free-standing equestrian statue was envisioned but Shaw's family thought that type of memorial should be reserved for officers of a higher rank. Saint-Gaudens then came up with having the troops in relief with Shaw on the horse in front, thereby reducing his importance. Saint-Gaudens took his time trying to get everything just right and the monument was dedicated in 1897. The life-size plaster version, used as the model for the bronze version, continued to evolve and was exhibited in Paris in 1898.
It was purchased in the United States in 1902 and remained on display until 1919 when it was covered by a wall. It was presented to the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in 1949 and left exposed to the elements from 1959 on. A bronze cast of the plaster was made and then the plaster was given to the National Gallery of Art on long-term loan from the National Park Service which now administers the historic site.
Here's a front-on photo of the memorial with a spectator provided for scale.
Biographies:
Robert Shaw (USA) was the son of a well-to-do Boston abolitionist. On Jan 26 1863, the Massachusettes governor John Andrew secured permission to raise black regiments. The 54th Massachusetts Colored Regiment, the first black regiment from a northern state, was formed as a result. Andrew selected Shaw, one of a small group of Union officers who believed that black troops could be trained to match the fighting quality of white soldiers. He raised the regiment and set off to South Carolina. In mid-July, 1863, Quincy Gillmore decided to attack the several Confederate forts on Morris Island that guarded the approaches to Charleston DC. Shaw's regiment attacked James Island as a diversionary assault. On July 18, the regiment was moved to Morris Island where Shaw accepted an offer to lead the Federal assault on Battery Wagner. The troops stormed the beach that night and Shaw led his troops to the parapets of the fort, at which time he was killed. The Union troops lost 1500 men in the assault, about ten times the Confederate losses. One of the blacks in the regiment would become the first African American to receive a Medal of Honor. The Confederate general ordered Shaw's body stripped of its officer's uniform and thrown into the grave with twenty of his men. The remains of the regiment participated in the seige which eventually took the fort. Several weeks later, when the fort was in Federal hands, Shaw's parents explicitly requested that their son remain buried with his men.
Augustus Saint-Gaudens was trained in the arts in Europe, making his living in commissions, mostly portraits. He returned to New York in 1875 and worked for Tiffany Studios. He created the Farragut Monument in New York city in 1881. The nation was swept up in a desire to commemorate the heroes of the Civil War and Saint-Gaudens did well in this environment. He did the standing figure of Abraham Lincoln (1884-87, Chicago), equestrian statues of Generals Logan (1897, Chicago) and Sherman (1892-1903, New York). He also did the Adams Memorial (1886-1891, Wash DC). He redesigned the US coinage in 1905. He died in 1907.
AAA "Gem": AAA considers this location to be a "must see" point of interest. To see pictures of other areas that AAA considers to be Gems, click here.
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.)
I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com
and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
Connection Not Secure messages? Those warnings you get from your browser about this site not having secure connections worry some people. This means this site does not have SSL installed (the link is http:, not https:). That's bad if you're entering credit card numbers, passwords, or other personal information. But this site doesn't collect any personal information so SSL is not necessary. Life's good!