
While living and working in France for three years, Augustus Saint-Gaudens met the French painter Jules Bastien-Lepage. “He asked if I would make a medallion of him,” Saint-Gaudens recalled, “in exchange for a portrait of myself. Of course I agreed to the proposal.” Bastien-Lepage is posed more formally than the subjects of the two other Saint-Gaudens medallions in this gallery. Translated inscription: "Jules Bastien-Lepage, at 31 years of age, Paris, 1880 Augustus Saint-Gaudens made this."