Daniel Chester French: Cornish

"Christmas Morning" by Maxfield Parrish

"Cornish was, in my day, and of course still is, a community rather than a village, a scattering group of houses among the New Hampshire hills. For the mail and for whatever small business affairs there were, we drove down long hills, and along flat river banks, and through an old ramshackle covered bridge, into the town of Windsor.

The places were lovely and unusual. There was none of the old-fashioned method of clearing off a tract of land, cutting down trees, filling up ravines, laying out roads between the house and the view. In other words, the taking out of everything that naturally grew there and putting in everything that was foreign.

I think of the sculptor, Herbert Adam's place how exquisite it was, and yet a house and a barn about sixty feet apart with a high fence connecting the two and painted white, a parallelogram of green inside, a few columns, a stone floor against the house, and am amphora or a colored relief against the white walls of the barn - one might have been in Italy or anywhere, and yet no effort, no expense, no display.

And of course Maxfield Parrish's place - a little rambling farmhouse on a hillside, as I remember it. We wandered up along a winding pathway, and there, in front of the house a few yards away and slightly lower, was the oval pool which he has made famous with blue waters and peaked Alps, recumbent maidens and youths.

Charles Platt's home was a kind of American Italy. The Tom Dewing house, low upon the road, with its little garden ablaze, as I remember it, with every shade of yellow, and upon the hill opposite, the Italian villa which Mrs. Johnston, then Miss Annie Lazarus had built and made beautiful.

Some of the artists used to say that Saint-Gaudens had the only real house in Cornish. It was a brick of the severe Colonial type, and had in the earlier days been a tavern. He had done everything to it that he could think of to make it as little like New England as possible. He had put an elaborate fence around the top of the bank with Greek heads at regular intervals, and a big, elaborate porch at the front to get that 'infernal Puritan look' out of it, which offended his Celtic soul. This porch looked towards Ascutney, as do most of the houses in Cornish, just as in Sicily they look toward Aetna, and in Japan towards Fujiyama."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Memories of a Sculptor's Wife" by Mary Adams French.)

Daniel Chester French: The Chicago World's Fair

Daniel Chester French's statue of the "Republic" with his
and Edward Clark Potter's Quadriga atop the Great Arch

"When our child and I came back to America in the spring of 1893 and went to Chicago, we found Mr. French with a tremendous group of other artists working upon the buildings of the World's Fair. It was an interesting time, with so much going on, on a very big scale, everyone doing something, Millet, MacMonnies, Kenyon Cox, Blashfield, and others. Augustus Lukeman, sculptor of the 'Stone Mountain Memorial,' had charge of Mr. French's particular gang.

Mr. French was building the great statue of the 'Republic,' sixty-five feet high, which was to stand in the Lagoon. It was a good deal, it seemed to me, like building the Tower of Babel. They made a big square platform a few feet from the ground, and upon this, near the edge, a kind of stockade or fence ten feet high in broad convolutions, covered it with a mixture of jute and plaster which gradually developed into the great ripples of a not very conventional woman's skirt.

Of course, it was a good deal of a job for a mere artist to plan this great structure, but I have always said that, if Mr. French had not been a sculptor, he would have been an inventor; and the work went steadily on until finally all the sections, one at a time, were carried out, planted in the Lagoon, and the head and shoulders of the statue settled into place.

He and Edward Potter were also making some figures for the Quadriga, which was to stand upon the Great Arch where the Lagoon opened out into the lake, and four groups of bulls and horses and humans, to stand at the entrance of the Agricultural Building. One corner of the interior of the building was fenced off from this particular work into a rough studio, and there Mr. French and Mr. Potter made their horses with the attendant figures of girls and pages, and here the models came and posed for them, some in Greek draperies, and sometimes, I imagine, without draperies.

I used to go down and watch the work going on and shiver to see my only husband climbing around at such a height. The men were always tumbling off things, the work was rushed, and the workmen were perfectly reckless. Ambulances were dashing around the town at all hours of the day and night, and we wives, sitting at home, used to wonder at each noise clanging by the house which particular husband was being brought home, and what particular accident had happened to him!"

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Memories of a Sculptor's Wife" by Mary Adams French.)

Daniel Chester French: The Music Club

"La Carmencita" by J.S. Sargent

"In those early years in New York we were invited to join the Music Club. It was started, I believe, by Mrs. Gilder, Mrs. Pierpont Morgan, Mrs. Henry Holt, George Vanderbilt and those two tall beautiful Minturn girls, who would have lent distinction to any assembly. It met in the great studio of William Merritt Chase on West Tenth Street. 

Chase was a real Bohemian with his soft tie, his narrow French silk hat, looking (as he, of course, wanted to look) as if he had just escaped from the Latin Quarter. He had no money to speak of, but he was long as to children - I believe there were eight - and as to studios. Room after room, as I remember them, full of all kinds of curios that he had picked up all over the world. We used to go there once a month in the winter to hear great artists play amid congenial surroundings and among friends. Among others I there heard Ysaye, Plançon, and Paderewski.

One evening Carmencita danced there, but it was not for the Music Club, and I did not see it and had to be content with that my husband told me of it. Sargent was painting her portrait. They said he sat and watched her as if almost in a trance, hypnotized by the motion, grace, abandon, which he put into every inch of one of his greatest of portraits."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Memories of a Sculptor's Wife" by Mary Adams French.)

 

Daniel Chester French: Marriage

"Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and Alice Cogswell"
by Daniel Chester French

"Dan French and I were married in Washington in July, a terrible time and place to be sure, in which to marry, or to do anything, but if one will marry an artist...

A few weeks before the day set for the wedding, which was to have been in June, Dan wrote me, 'What should you think if I told you that even now at the last minute I must change my statue' - this was the Gallaudet which was to be put up at the Deaf Mute College outside of Washington -' and I am afraid it will put off our wedding for a month.'

The rest of the letter was apologetic and contrite, but - 'Saint-Gaudens has been in and says that the legs are too short. Perhaps I should have known this without any one telling me, had I not been diverted by the prospects of approaching matrimony. However, when you can pin Saint-Gaudens down and get a real criticism from him, it is better than anybody's, and so what can I do except give the Doctor an inch or two more of leg, and meanwhile, what kind of a lover will you think me anyhow?'

Of course I knew well enough that, in sculpture, legs and arms and heads were always being cut off and jostled about, and there was nothing to do but accept it, so we picked out a nice hot day in the hotteset city in the world, so to speak, and were married, and I went to New York to live.

Dan French had lived in New York only that last year before our marriage, having given up his studios in Concord and Boston. That first winter he had worked in that of his friend while his new house in West Eleventh Street was being prepared for us. This house was most interesting and I loved it, but a home in a side street, with all the hustle and hubbub of a great city, with no intimate friends and no neighbors, seemed somewhat appalling to me after the easy-going life of Washington in which Ihad grown up. My husband knew already most of the literary and artistic people who afterwards made our lives interesting, but it took a little while for me to know who people were, and to get used to the hurried, slap-dash methods of a metropolis.

There were the Gilders, the Saint-Gaudenses, the Will Lows, the Dewings, the Kenyon Coxes, the Blashfields, William Dean Howells, the Martin Conways, and always Mr. French's old friend, Benjamin C. Porter. And at these houses, which were thrown open to us, there were all their friends, writers and painters from all over the world."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Memories of a Sculptor's Wife" by Mary Adams French.)

 

 

Daniel Chester French: Endymion and Home

"The Awakening of Endymion" by Daniel Chester French

"Ensconced in the fairytale setting of Thomas Ball's studio whose uplifting atmosphere he likened to a Renaissance workplace of old, Dan French began shaping his concept for 'Endymion," the long-slumbering Aeolian shepherd of Greek myth. Although he carefully observed Ball chipping away skillfully at polished stone, French had not quite mastered the technique himself. If nothing else, he learned in Florence to concentrate on his clay and plaster models, and delegate to specialists the task of enlarging, casting, and carving his 'sketches' into final form. It was a routine he would follow for the rest of his long career. 

As French learned, great sculptors conceived their works, but did not necessarily carve them, too. Michelangelo may once have done so in this city, but the masters of the modern age were no longer expected to be expert marble cutters. French vowed never to take chisel to marble again. Except for polishing and finishing, which he would always insist on performing himself before any of his marbles were unveiled, after 'Endymion' he never again worked in the medium. 

During his final months in Florence, he added the finishing touches to his sculpture, for which he had high hopes. He had labored on it for more than a year. Once, after sending a photograph of the conceptual clay sketch home to his father, he had been gratified to learn that his family and friends thought it 'the loveliest thing that ever was.' But then others added what must have been received in Florence as a devastating critique 'Can a sleeping man's arm stay up from his body as the left one is? Would it not fall down?' Young French set to work trying to subdue it.

Not until late June did he satisfy himself that the sculpture could not be improved upon further. After bidding goodbye to the sprawling Powers family, French departed Florence on July 10, 1876 - just six days after the centennial of American independence. He was also determined to attract a high-paying customer for 'Endymion.' He was destined to be disappointed. Eventually, shipped back to Concord at considerable expense, it earned decent enough reviews when placed briefly on exhibit at Boston's St. Botolph Club, but still ended up a white elephant. Years later, perhaps eager to forget the entire experience, a disappointed French would leave the statue behind when he moved out of his Concord home. A century later still, a subsequent owner would relegate the weather-beaten marble to the backyard. Not until 1983 would it be rescued and installed at Chesterwood."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Monument Man: The Life and Art of Daniel Chester French" by Harold Holzer.)  

 

Daniel Chester French: Italy and Thomas Ball

"While Dan French's father in Concord was looking after his boy's interests at home, the son over in Florence, where his good luck seemed to pursue him, was trying not to have too good a time. 'They all do everything they can to make me happy,' he wrote. 'They not only treat me like one of the family, but they take me about to see everything and everybody - such interesting people!'

He lived with Preston Powers' family [Dan's friend and son of sculptor Hiram Powers], and within a few days of his arrival, he and Mrs. Powers, a young girl of twenty or twenty-one, went out in search of a room which would be suitable for a studio. They found one quite near the Porta Romana, outside which dwelt the numerous families of Powers, and Mr. Thomas Ball, at that time the most distinguished American sculptor as well as a man of a most wonderful personality.

Mr. Ball's villa was a large brown structure, in the middle of Italian gardens, a coterie of the literati, the musicians, the artists from America and England, and from the neighboring Florence, delightful surroundings for a young man who had led such a quiet life in a small town in America. To the youth it seemed incredible that such good luck could have come to him. 

Mr. Ball wrote to Dan's father:

My dear Sir: You would like to know why I have done this thing. I would ask you why the hearts and homes of the entire neighborhood were thrown open to your son before he had been here a week? Why do all the mothers (five at least), if he happens to be unwell vie with each other in their endeavors to make him enjoy it? Why did I, when I went from curiosity, to see his 'Minute Man,' notwithstanding its surprising merit for a first work, find myself when I left the studio, thinking much more about the artist than the statue? And why did I go again and take my wife to see the artist?

As far as I am concerned, I will tell you, I recognized in his simple, ingenuous artist nature, something more than talent; something indispensable to a true artist. And when he came here and took a studio not far from me, but too far for me to see him as often as was good for him, I thought how, twenty years ago, I came here to make my first struggle, and how welcome was the face of dear old Powers whenever it brightened my door. 

And then I thought how nice it would be, when I was up to my elbows in clay, on a ladder 15 feet in the air, to have someone that I could call upon to receive my visitors; and I decided at once to give him a corner in my studio and invited him forthwith. I find it works well... and if he does not try my patience...he can stay as long as he pleases... Believe me, my dear sir, it will always give me pleasure to do anything in my power to advance the professional interests of your son. Very truly yours, Thomas Ball

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Memories of a Sculptor's Wife" by Mary Adams French.)

 

Daniel Chester French: The Minute Man

The "Minute Man" by Daniel Chester French

"The town of Concord had decided to erect a statue of a Minute Man on the battle-field by the 'rude bridge that arched the flood.' The Commission appropriated one thousand dollars, and had unofficially asked Dan French, at that time twenty-one, to make the statue. The tradition in the family is that he made a sketch and took it down to Mr. Emerson and Judge Hoar, upon whose recommendation it was immediately accepted.

Of course this commission was a serious thing for a youth whose only training had been one month in the studio of Mr. Ward in New York, some lessons in drawing with Dr. Rimmer in Brookline, a prize in the cattle show the year before, and some advice from Miss May Alcott. 'I wonder whether I can do it,' he wrote to someone. 'By this time next year I shall know.'

He made his models, the second and final one in a room in a business building in Boston, with a poor light. He still wonders how he was able to do it. There was no one except a stray sculptor at that time who knew anything about the mechanics of the trade, so he and his father went to work, and his practical mechanical instinct carried him through, though with various catastrophes. When his first model was finished, they got the plaster ready - the amount which someone had told him would be sufficient - made their mold, dissolved the plaster, stood the model on its head, and poured the plaster into it. There must have been a hole somewhere, underneath the hair perhaps, for all the plaster ran through the mold and out upon the floor - the last drop they had - so they had to wait for another day when they could renew their supply.

I don't remember whether it was the 'Minute Man' or whether it was a bust made about the same time which gave him great trouble as to the hair. They tried in every way to make it have a natural look, and finally his father said, 'Oh, take a brush and comb, and treat it the way you would treat hair, and I guess it will look like hair.' His struggles must have been of great interest and amusement to his family.

The statue was unveiled after Dan had gone to Italy for studies. His father wrote, 'A perfect spring morning. The sun is bright and the air still, and the bluebirds and robins are talking very busily about their nests... The old Minute Man does us credit... Everybody, great and small, is delighted. I confess to a great thrill at the sight of 'D.C. French' on the base!'"

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Memories of a Sculptor's Wife" by Mary Adams French.)