Daniel Chester French

1850 - 1931  (81 years)    Has more than 100 ancestors but no descendants in this family tree.

• Name	Daniel Chester French
  Birth	20 Apr 1850	Exeter, New Hampshire, USA
  Gender	Male
  Death	7 Oct 1931	Stockbridge, Berkshire CO, Massachusetts, USA
  Person ID	I331976	Geneagraphie
  Last Modified	4 Jan 2002

  
  

  Father	Henry Flagg French,   b. Abt 1800, Massachusetts, USA d. Massachusetts, USA
  Mother	Anne Richardson,   b. Abt 1820, Massachusetts, USA d. Massachusetts, USA
  Family ID	F131884	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

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• Notes

  Sculptor moved with his family to Concord, Massachusetts. He enrolled in MIT, but dropped out after two semesters to pursue apprenticeships in New York and Boston after having been introduced to sculpture by Louisa May Alcott's sister, May. French received his first major commission in 1872 for Concord's Minute Man statue. After completing the work, he spent almost two years in Italy as an apprentice to sculptor Thomas Ball. Returning to America, he moved into a farm house in Stockbridge, Massachusetts and took on more and more commissions, including the Herodotus and History statues at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC (1890), several works for the Chicago World's Fair (1893), a bust and replica of MIT President Francis Amasa Walker (1898), bronze doors Knowledge and Wisdom, Truth and Romance, and Music and Poetry for the Boston Public Library (1902), Longfellow Memorial in Cambridge (1914), Dupont Memorial Fountain in Washington, DC (1917), and the Washington Irving Memorial in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York (1928). French first sculpted Abraham Lincoln in 1909 as a commission for the Nebraska State Capitol. He began his statue for the Lincoln Memorial in 1915, working with Henry Bacon, architect of the memorial. After creating several models, French hired his frequent collaborators, the Piccirilli brothers, to carve the marble. The Lincoln Memorial was dedicated on May 30, 1922. Upon his death in 1931, Daniel Chester French had created over 250 sculpture and memorials in 21 states as well as in Paris, France. *********************** reared in Cambridge and Concord, Massachusetts. He studied anatomy and drawing in Boston before being accepted to work in the New York studio of John Quincy Adams Ward, then considered the leading practitioner of sculpture in this country. A critic writes that in Ward's studio French began to seek "higher forms of sculpture" than the small genre pieces he had been modeling. Returning home to Concord, French received a commission for a statue to commemorate the battle of Concord Bridge. His resulting work, the bronze Minute Man, brought overnight fame to the artist. French furthered his education abroad, in Florence in the studio of American artist Thomas Ball, and in Paris. His colossal figure, The Republic, which can still be seen in Jackson Park in Chicago, received public acclaim at the Chicago Fair of 1893. Throughout his long career, French executed numerous public sculptures and private commissions, including portrait busts of prominent New Englanders. Among his most successful works are the gigantic seated figure of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, and standing Lincoln at the west entrance of the Nebraska State Capitol, for which the maquette in this exhibition was a model. In his book, The History of American Sculpture (New York, NY: The Macmillan Company, 1930), Laredo Taft wrote of French, "It is his great distinction to have created good sculpture which the people could love; works which reveal their beauty to the most primitively informed in art, and which nevertheless are gratifying to the brother craftsmen. . . . No one has a greater following and yet, most agreeable paradox! no one has done better work."