The Children of Prescott Hall Butler

Cox’s steadfast support of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, both during the sculptor’s lifetime and posthumously, is encapsulated in this image, created by rubbing charcoal on paper against an early plaster or bronze replica of the low-relief Children of Prescott Hall Butler (05.15.1). In addition to his work as an easel and mural painter, Cox, by the mid-1880s, provided illustrations and art criticism for leading publications. This portrait of Charles Stewart Butler (1876-1954) and Lawrence Smith Butler (1875-1954) was reproduced as an engraving in Cox’s seminal article on Saint-Gaudens for Century Magazine, published in November 1887 to coincide with the unveilings of the sculptor’s The Standing Lincoln (2012.14a, b) in Chicago and The Puritan (39.65.53) in Springfield, MA. Cox particularly praised Saint-Gaudens’s technical prowess in relief sculpture: “Low-relief is thus an art nearly allied to painting, and which deals with aspects rather than facts, and its exercise calls for the highest powers of perception and execution which an artist possesses…. St. Gaudens’s success in it has been very great.”