Hiawatha (sculpture) Hiawatha (sculpture) Hiawath is a 19th century sculpture executed in marble by American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. The work, which depicts the Iroquois leader Hiawatha, is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Augustus Saint-Gaudens sculpted his interpretation of the famed Iroquois leader between 1872 and 1874. He was inspired to create the work by "The Song of Hiawatha", an 1855 epic poem by poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Longfellow's poem was well received by American audiences, and the epic work resulted in a rekindling of interest in Hiawatha and the waxing days of the Iroquois Confederacy. The poem is
The Song of Hiawatha "The arrow-maker and his daughter", later called "The Wooing of Hiawatha", was modelled in 1866 and carved in 1872. By that time she had achieved success with individual heads of Hiawatha and Minnehaha. Carved in Rome, these are now held by the Newark Museum in New Jersey. In 1872 Lewis carved "The Marriage of Hiawatha" in marble, a work purchased in 2010 by the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. Other 19th-century sculptors inspired by the epic were Augustus Saint-Gaudens, whose marble statue of the seated Hiawatha (1874) is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Jacob Fjelde, who created a