Louis St. Gaudens, Frederick MacMonnies, Homer,
Augusta and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, first summer in Cornish, 1885

By June, the Saint-Gaudens family and sculptural assistants Louis St. Gaudens, Philip Martiny, and Frederick MacMonnies, were in residence in Cornish. Saint-Gaudens immediately set to work on a commission for a statue of Abraham Lincoln. He also began to work on the house and grounds, making additions and repairs, and planning gardens. Saint-Gaudens rented the Cornish house for the next several summers, where he worked on his sculpture commissions. Soon, the sculptor's artist friends began to rent summer homes in the area, and by the 1890s, Cornish was known as an artist colony, often referred to as "Little New York."