If, as I’ve done many times, you walk up the wide paved path from the Park Street MBTA station to the Massachusetts State House, you will pass a great work of art: “The Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment,” a bronze relief sculpture by Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

And if you are like me, you will walk by it without ever really taking the time to appreciate it.

And, like me, you might sit in your pandemic lockdown and rue the fact that you didn’t take the time to look when you had the chance, probably because you were too busy, too late, had too much on your mind, or were too distracted by a text, an email, or a phone call.

But, if you happen to be still at home during the 11th month of a pandemic that will end, but not as soon as we hope, you can at least take a minute to ponder the work of Saint-Gaudens, who was born on March 1, 1848. He is pictured on today’s #stampoftheday, a 3-cent stamp issued in 1938 that was one of the 35 stamps issued that year honoring “famous Americans.”

While the reputations of many of those “famous Americans” have diminished in the 82 years since those stamps were issued, Saint-Gaudens’ reputation has not. Rather, according to the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website, his “contribution to American Renaissance art and culture must be measured not only as a master sculptor of works large and small, public and private, but also as a gifted teacher, arbiter of taste, and professional role model for a succeeding generation of French-trained American sculptors.”

Saint-Gaudens had a prolific and productive career, producing well-known statues of Abraham Lincoln (for Lincoln Park in Chicago), William Tecumseh Sherman (Grand Army Plaza in Manhattan, the southeast corner of Central Park), the Adams Memorial (in Washington DC’s Rock Creek Park), the Henry Maxwell Memorial (in Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza), and Diana of the Tower (which stood over the second Madison Square Garden and is now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art).

But, apparently, the Shaw/54th Regiment, which he worked on for 14 years, is the greatest of his works. The memorial depicts Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who was white, leading members of the 54th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the second Black regiment to fight in the war, as it marched down Beacon Street in Boston on May 28, 1863. Less than two months later, Shaw and about 40 percent of the unit later were killed at the Second Battle of Fort Wagner in Charleston, SC.

The piece was originally envisioned as a traditional equestrian monument to Shaw. But Shaw’s family, a wealthy Boston clan strongly opposed to slavery, requested that it also honor the Black men who served and died alongside him, which made it the nation’s monument first to honor Black soldiers.

Moreover, each of those soldiers is unique; indeed Saint-Gaudens used Black men of different ages and different body types as models. Artistically, the work was “real perfection,” observed Henry James not long after it unveiled.

The back of the piece includes a lengthy quote from Charles W. Eliot, then the president of Harvard, underscoring the importance of the moment shown in the piece. “The White Officers taking life and honor in their hands cast in their lot with men of a despised race unproven in war and risked death as inciters of servile insurrection if taken prisoners besides encountering all the common perils of camp march and battle,” it says. “The Black rank and file volunteered when disaster clouded the Union Cause. Served without pay for eighteen months till given that of white troops. Faced threatened enslavement if captured. Were brave in action. Patient under heavy and dangerous labors. And cheerful amid hardships and privations. Together they gave to the Nation and the World undying proof that Americans of African descent possess the pride, courage and devotion of the patriot soldier.”

And yes, while I have long known about the piece, I can’t tell you the last time (if ever) that I actually stopped and looked at it. I thought about those multiple oversights earlier today, around sunset, when I took a short walk around my neighborhood on a cold, blustery evening. (March definitely is coming in like a lion!). There were golden clouds in the western sky and I stopped, for a moment, to try and really take them in.

Later, I remembered this Goethe quote that was part of a piece of art that used to hang in our house: “One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.” To which I add, one ought, when one gets a chance, pause and take a great piece of art.

Be well, stay safe, fight for justice and work for peace.