Augustus Saint-Gaudens's and Stanford White's memorial to Marian Adams (commonly, but mistakenly, called “Grief”) is not a portrait of the wife of historian and author Henry Adams, who had died a suicide in 1885, but rather a contemplative, introspective sibyl that expresses the intellectualized pantheism of its patron and designers. White designed a simple granite stele and plinth with low, angular wings as an elegant foil for Saint-Gaudens's seated and cloaked bronze figure, setting the whole amidst a sacred holly grove.