Heritage Auctions in Dallas will offer a rare gilded bronze reduction of Augustus Saint-Gaudens's Victory on 13 November, as the centrepiece of its American Art Signature auction. The 38-and-a-half-inch sculpture, cast between 1912 and the early 1920s, carries an estimate of $800,000 to $1.2 million and leads a tightly curated sale of just 80 lots spanning the Hudson River School, the Gilded Age, American Modernism, the Harlem Renaissance and the Golden Age of Illustration.

The figure began life as part of the Sherman monument at Grand Army Plaza in New York, which Saint-Gaudens worked on from 1892 until its unveiling in 1903. After the sculptor's death in 1907, his widow Augusta arranged for a reduced plaster model, from which this bronze was cast; it is believed to be one of perhaps a dozen known examples of the reduction, with others held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Toledo Museum of Art.

The model for the striding winged figure was Hettie Anderson, a Black woman from Columbia, South Carolina, who posed for Saint-Gaudens in 1897. She later asserted control over her own image, registering a copyright in 1908 for the first study of Victory's head that the artist had given her and declining the family's request to reproduce it. President Theodore Roosevelt's admiration for the monument led him to ask Saint-Gaudens to redesign American coinage, and the figure's drapery and commanding presence fed into Liberty on the 1907 twenty-dollar Double Eagle, a design that remained in use until 1933.

The sale also closes Heritage's two-year series of auctions from the BSA Settlement Trust, with proceeds going to compensate survivors of childhood sexual abuse in Scouting. Works by Norman Rockwell and Joseph Csatari feature in the final Trust offering, alongside two Rockwell studies for Saturday Evening Post covers, a J.C. Leyendecker recruiting poster, Jacob Lawrence's Spring Plowing of 1942 and Milton Avery's Blonde Nude of 1960.