Daniel Chester French

Daniel Chester French (1850-1931)

Daniel Chester French was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, on April 20, 1850, to a distinguished New England family. He was the youngest of four children born to Henry Flagg French, a lawyer, judge and farmer, and his wife, Anne Richardson French.

The Frenches were a supportive family that valued and nurtured Daniel’s artistic talent. They also possessed a strong sense of family and of history, and, as a boy, Daniel took as his middle name “Chester,” after the name of the New Hampshire town of his beloved grandparents. Unfortunately, tragedy struck the family quite early when Daniel’s mother passed away when he was just six years old. Four years later, in 1860, the Frenches moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and later to nearby Concord.

French attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a prestigious university located in Cambridge. However, after failing physics, algebra and chemistry, he left the school without a degree. French, with encouragement from his parents (his father had since remarried), turned to his passion for sculpting. Abigail May Alcott, sister of the novelist Louisa, gave French instruction and advice. He soon went into business modeling portraits of family and friends and creating decorative figurines.

In 1870, at the age of twenty, French pursued further artistic training in New York City. His talent caught the attention of prominent sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward (1830-1910), who agreed to take him into his studio. French also travelled abroad extensively, including a two-year sojourn in Italy. Returning in the summer of 1876, French was ready to establish himself as a professional sculptor. In his absence, French’s father, Henry Flagg French, had been appointed assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury. Dan joined his family in Washington, where he obtained several commissions for federal buildings. Eager to strike out on his own, however, and worried about pursuing projects generated through his father’s influence, he soon returned to Concord, where he built a studio adjacent to the family home in the spring of 1879. Within a decade, he was one of the leading artists in the country.

During his long career, French created hundreds of works of art. Some of his public sculpture, like the Minute Man and his statute of Abraham Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial, are among the nation’s most treasured icons. Drawing on myth and history, French and his fellow artists enlivened the cities and towns of America with the symbols of their age. Working with architects, landscape planners, and craftsmen from the 1870s into the 1920s, they embodied in stone and bronze the exuberance and confidence of the nation, and they fostered a shared, idealized vision for the future.

By 1896, French was so successful that in addition to a large studio in New York City, he was able to establish a second studio and home in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. The old farm’s convenient location between Boston and New York allowed the sculptor to maintain important relationships with artists and donors in both cities. He and his family lived here at Chesterwood in Stockbridge from May through October for the next thirty-six years. The sculptor died at Chesterwood in 1931 at the age of eighty-one, followed by his wife Mary Adams French in 1939, and their daughter Margaret in 1973.