Daniel Chester French

Daniel Chester French was one of the nation’s leading sculptors at the turn of the last century. After his death in 1931, the United Press wire service reported that French had “more than 100 public monuments” to his credit, “scattered throughout the United States.” Professionally, apart from several years in Europe, he divided his time between New York City and Chesterwood, the French family home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Chesterwood is now preserved as a museum open to the public. 

For brief periods in the U.S., French studied with sculptors John Quincy Adams Ward. and William Rimmer, and the painter William Morris Hunt. In 1874-1876, he continued his studies in Florence, Italy, in the studio of the American sculptor Thomas Ball. In Italy, he drew inspiration from classical Roman and Italian Renaissance art. In 1886-1887, he spent a year in Paris, focusing on the contemporary Beaux-Arts style of sculpture.  

As a  young man, French had come under the influence of Abigail May Alcott, sister of the novelist Louisa May Alcott, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the essayist and transcendentalist poet. Through Emerson’s influence he received his first public commission, The Minute Man in Concord, Massachusetts (1871-1875). The distinctive combination of force and vitality evident in The Minute Man, and other historical and contemporary subjects, reached a peak of perfection in French’s magnum opus, the seated Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial (1911-1912) on the Mall in Washington, D.C. 

Among his other master works are the seated figure of John Harvard on the Harvard campus (1884), and the bronze statue representing Alma Mater (1903), on the steps of the Low Memorial Library at Columbia University.