His painting "The Bridal Morning", issued in 1909, won second prize in the Carnegie Art Institute's annual exhibition in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but became the cause of a scandal over its erotic mood.

[4] With the beginning of World War I Sauter was, despite married to an Englishwoman, interned as an enemy alien in 1916 at Alexandra Palace and later expelled.

Here he had support from the families of glass industrialist Otto Schott and his son-in-law Heinrich Gerland, lawyer and professor at the University of Jena.

At the recommendation of Gerland, Sauter created a series of 30 professorial portraits for the University of Jena between 1922 and 1923, which he executed as charcoal drawings.

This canvas, very different in subject from those he is best known by, symbolises the homage of Labour to Beauty, to whom the products of local industry are offered by attendant females, and is certainly one of the most harmonious and complete pictures that the artist has produced.