Daniel Chester French: An Introduction

Head of the "Lincoln" and Daniel Chester French

Daniel Chester French, the creator of the famous Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., was, at first, just one of Mary Adams French's cousins, but their lives were to become intertwined in the years to come, as he studied abroad and she grew into a young woman. This story is told in her book, "Memories of a Sculptor's Wife," which we shall take up at that point in their lives.

"When I was about sixteen, my cousin Dan came home from Europe and came with my young aunt Sarita to see me. I remember it perfectly, the first time I definitely remember him, in that square box of a convent parlor, the high room painted a gloomy brown, with horsehair furniture, and one entire side a square lattice, through which now and then a nun was permitted to talk to a friend. Dan was twenty-six, and, I thought, very handsome. It was romantic to tell to my school fellows of this new cousin, a sculptor - an unknown quantity in those days in Washington - who had lived abroad. He had just come back from his studies in Mr. [Thomas] Ball's studio in Florence, and spent the next two winters in Washington, where, though I saw him little, he brought a new and artistic touch into my life.

When I read of Raphael, 'whom the gods loved and whom women loved,' I have often thought that my artist was at least born with a golden spoon in his mouth. Of sturdy New England stock, a race of lawyers back of him, with an intellectual environment certainly unequaled in American life, Dan French seems never to have encountered the struggles of poverty and misunderstanding which have been considered - which he theoretically considered - as necessary to the development of genius.

His father was a judge, his two grandfathers were lawyers - one of them Chief Justice of the State of New Hampshire - while his life, during the most crucial years, was spent amid the 'high thinking and plain living' of Old Concord.

It was a simple and interesting life when I came to know it a few years later, but just before that time, while he was growing up, while his first statue, the 'Minute Man,' was coming into life, and during his two years in Italy in the studio of Mr. Ball, it must have been filled with an atmosphere of high purpose that was unusual as well as of great intellectual interest."

To be continued

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