Daniel Chester French: Lincoln Memorial Preliminary Work

Daniel French with a 6 ft. high model for
the Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C.

"It was during the last years of the war [WWI] that Mr. French made, or at least finished, the seated statue of Lincoln for the Memorial in Washington D.C. His friend, and for years his collaborator, Henry Bacon, had been appointed the architect to design and build the Memorial, and he immediately engaged Mr. French to make the statue for which his beautiful building was to be the shrine. This was in 1915, but it was not till 1920 that it was finished and erected.

Few people understand the hazards, aside from the labor,  of cutting a statue in stone. The finest marble still comes from the ancient quarries in Italy - Carrara and Serravezza; but however carefully selected, a dark spot or defect of some sort may develop, necessitating the choosing of another block and beginning all over again. An excellent white marble from Georgia was chosen as being particularly well adapted to the execution of so large a figure as the Lincoln.

The popular idea that a sculptor rises from his couch at midnight, seizes his mallet and chisel, and, in a fine frenzy, hews out a beautiful statue before morning, exists only in poetry. Sculpture is a much more serious business than that. Occasionally a sculptor, when the spirit moves him, himself cuts a head or a torso out of the marble without a model or previous study, but usually the sculptor's model is copied by a marble-cutter and finished by the artist. There is evidence to prove that the old-time sculptor proceeded in much the same way as do the sculptors of the present day.

In order to determine how large the statue should be, a temporary plaster model of the Lincoln was made about twelve feet in height and erected in place in the Memorial. This proved much too small, and two solar prints were made, one eighteen feet in height, the other twenty feet, and put in place. Cut out from the background, they looked strangely like the real thing, and, as a consequence of these experiments, the statue was eventually made twenty feet in height instead of twelve as was orginally planned. Mr. French and Mr. Bacon, our daughter, and Evelyn Longman, who did much of the decorative work in the Memorial, went down to Washington to try the experiments."

To be continued

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