Daniel Chester French (1850–1931) was one of the most important American sculptors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His summer home and studio, Chesterwood, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, shows how a leading public artist of that era lived and worked. This account is drawn from a National Park Service Teaching with Historic Places lesson.
An age of public sculpture
The decades after the Civil War brought enormous change as the United States grew more urban, industrial and diverse. Public art was seen as a way to express the country's new wealth and power, honor its heroes, and remind both longtime citizens and newcomers of values and traditions that seemed in danger of being lost. Sculptors enjoyed high status in the 50 years from 1875 to 1925. With architects and artists, they helped create the "White City" of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the City Beautiful movement, whose grand public buildings and boulevards seemed to promise an answer to the problems of industrial cities. Their monuments, inspired by classical Greece and Rome, linked a nation just beginning to see itself as a world power to the great civilizations of the past, and their portraits of national heroes were meant to encourage patriotism and to "Americanize" the waves of immigrants many saw as a threat.
The sculptor
French was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, on April 20, 1850, the youngest of four children in an old New England family. His father, a lawyer, was the first president of the Massachusetts Agricultural College and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury from 1876 to 1885. French became serious about sculpture after the family moved to Concord, Massachusetts, in 1867, where family friend Abigail May Alcott, a painter and sculptor, gave him his first lessons in modeling clay.
In 1873 another family friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, helped him win his first major commission: the Minute Man, to stand at the North Bridge in Concord for the centennial of the Revolution's first battles. Congress authorized melting down ten Civil War cannons for its bronze, townspeople searched their attics for militiamen's clothing, and several residents posed for the head. President Ulysses S. Grant, Longfellow, Emerson and other luminaries attended its dedication in April 1875 — but not French, who was in Florence learning marble cutting and casting, and later studied in Paris.
His reputation grew with portrait busts and monumental figures for public buildings. For the 1893 World's Fair, visited by some 27 million people, he made three large sculptures, including the 65-foot statue of the Republic at its center. From the early 20th century until his death he was regarded as the nation's foremost sculptor, often booked two or three years ahead, and produced more than 100 portrait statues, memorials and architectural sculptures. A member of the social elite, he moved easily among the industrialists and civic leaders who commissioned public art; sociable but reserved, he tended to accept rather than criticize the established order, and his patriotism shaped much of his work.
Finding Chesterwood
New York City, where French had lived and worked since 1888, was the unofficial capital of the art world, but artists often summered elsewhere. After renting a summer house in 1891 and 1893 in Cornish, New Hampshire, the artists' colony founded by sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, French and his wife looked for a place of their own. In 1895 they toured the Housatonic River Valley in the Berkshire Hills and visited Stockbridge, a summer retreat for wealthy Bostonians and New Yorkers. The next year French bought a farm a few miles from town and named it Chesterwood, after his family's hometown of Chester, New Hampshire.
New York City, where French worked, and his summer places: Cornish, New Hampshire, and Stockbridge, Massachusetts. National Park Service.
A studio built for sculpture
French's studio at Chesterwood. National Park Service, Polly Rettig, photographer
French's first priority was a studio. He had the farm's barn moved so he could build on its site, which had a fine view, and asked his friend the architect Henry Bacon to design it. The workroom was 30 feet square, with a 22-foot ceiling rising to 33 feet — room for the largest statue — and a huge north skylight and banks of windows for light. Its most remarkable feature was a revolving modeling table on a flatcar that ran on a short railroad track out through 22-foot doors. Since much of his work would stand outdoors, French wanted to roll works in progress into the sunlight to see how they looked.
The studio held sculptures in every stage, casting materials, portable steps for reaching the tops of tall statues, and shelves of plaster models. A more elegant reception room, with a piano, fireplace and a carved chest of models' costumes, was where French discussed designs, schedules and costs with clients; the family also used it for entertaining. A piazza looked out on Monument Mountain.
French spent half the year in New York and half at Chesterwood, where he worked in the studio from nine until half past five, usually with one or two assistants who prepared clay, cast plaster models and enlarged sculptures. Bacon also designed the main house in 1901, replacing a smaller farmhouse, to make room for visitors and the servants French brought from New York.
The main house at Chesterwood. National Park Service, Polly Rettig, photographer
The Abraham Lincoln
The Lincoln Memorial was planned to anchor a western extension of the National Mall on land reclaimed from the Potomac River. Henry Bacon designed its white marble temple and wanted French to sculpt the statue of Lincoln inside. After some delay French got the commission. In 1915 he began with a small clay sketch model, or maquette, about 7 inches high, writing to Bacon that he felt encouraged but was "suspicious of my enthusiasms." He modeled the head on photographs and Lincoln's death mask, studied how Lincoln placed his hands, and even cast his own hands for reference.
A larger working model settled the pose and clothing, and a half-size model the surface details. French worried that Bacon's huge building would dwarf anything but a massive figure. An eight-foot model looked tiny in the space, so he had photographs 14 to 18 feet high mounted on frames and tried each in turn; only the largest looked right. The statue grew from a planned 10 feet to 19, set on an 11-foot base. The six Piccirilli brothers of New York carved it from the half-size model, with French adding the finishing touches.
The Abraham Lincoln being installed at the Lincoln Memorial, 1922. National Archives and Records Administration
French was abroad during the installation and hurried to see it on his return. "I was very much relieved to see that it was not too large for its surroundings," he wrote. But he was horrified by the lighting: changes to the skylights had erased shadows his design depended on, turning Lincoln's expression into a blank stare. The problem remained at the dedication on Memorial Day 1922, when French was 72, though the crowds found the building and statue magnificent. It was solved only in 1926, when floodlights were installed to shine down on the figure.
French's daughter later told of an evening when French, working on the lighting in the shadows, watched an elderly man climb slowly up the steps, remove his hat, and kneel for a long time before the statue with his head bowed. It was Robert Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln's 83-year-old son.
Later years
French worked until his death in 1931, at 81. Not long before, he declared, "I'd like to live to be two thousand years old and just sculpt all the time." His funeral was held in the studio at Chesterwood, among the tools of the work he loved. Today Chesterwood is a historic house museum run by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and it looks much as it did in French's time.
Sources
- National Park Service, Teaching with Historic Places, "Chesterwood: The Workshop of an American Sculptor": https://www.nps.gov/articles/chesterwood-the-workshop-of-an-american-sculptor-teaching-with-historic-places.htm
- The lesson draws on Polly M. Rettig's National Historic Landmark documentation for the Daniel Chester French Home and Studio (National Park Service, 1974) and Michael Richman, Daniel Chester French: An American Sculptor (1976), among others.
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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