At Leisure:
Daniel Chester French’s
Portraits in Oil and Pastel

“At last I am a painter!” exclaimed Daniel Chester French in a January 1885 letter to his father. By the mid-1880s, French had already found success as a sculptor: his first public commission, "The Minute Man" in Concord, Massachusetts, had been a triumph and lauded by all who gazed upon it at the dedication in April of 1875. Returning from two years of study in Italy in 1876, French gained numerous commissions for allegorical sculpture groups to adorn new government buildings. In 1883, he was asked to sculpt a figure of John Harvard for Harvard University. Unveiled in 1884, the idealized portrait of the University’s founder was deemed a great success by critics and the public.

In January of 1885, French began painting lessons with the Ohio-born artist Joseph R. DeCamp. A skilled portraitist, DeCamp had traveled with his teacher, Frank Duveneck, to Munich to study at the Royal Academy. DeCamp had also spent time in Florence before returning to Boston in 1883, where he found fame as a member of the “Boston School,” a group of painters who specialized in portraits of women engaged in genteel pursuits such as reading, writing letters, playing music, and having tea within well-appointed, aesthetic interiors. Excited about these first lessons, French wrote to his father, “Mr. De Camp. . . started me in Monday afternoon and I have been painting a girl’s head every afternoon this week—from life. It is great fun and De Camp is so good a painter that I have the satisfaction of knowing that I am going right. This is what I have wanted for a good while and as I could not go abroad, it is a good thing that abroad should come to me. De Camp is fresh from the foreign schools.”

While living in Paris in 1886-87, French joined a drawing and painting class in the studio of Pierre-Paul-Léon Glaize (1842-1932), a French neo-classical painter who had trained at the famed Ecole des Beaux Arts. French wrote to his brother describing the class and wishing that he had studied drawing earlier in his career: “I draw in charcoal from the nude four or five afternoons a week. It is great fun but I wish I had done it about fifteen years ago. I intend to paint presently.”

After French returned to the United States from Paris, he continued to find success as a sculptor and would also make portraits in his leisure time. In the summer of 1893, while visiting the Cornish Colony in New Hampshire, French dabbled in pastels, making portraits of his wife and young daughter Margaret. After 1897, French spent summers in Stockbridge, Massachusetts; he would relax by making portraits of family, friends, and models beneath the north-facing windows in the reception room of his Chesterwood studio. French’s daughter Margaret was his most frequent model—she sat for at least four oil portraits and five in pastel. Other family members who sat for portraits include his wife Mary French, and nieces Anne Rainsford French, Dorothy Schoonmaker, and her sister Louise. Life-long friend William Brewster posed for the figure of Miles Standish for French’s "Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Memorial," as well as for two portraits in oil and one in pastel. Other friends and acquaintances who sat include Marjorie Lamond, Clara Morse, Helen Powers, and May Potter, wife of animal sculptor Edward Potter, who collaborated with French on equestrian monuments such as the George Washington for Paris, France. Models Hettie Anderson, John Campion, and Mary Lawton also sat in the reception room to have their portraits made. In "Memories of a Sculptor’s Wife," Mary French commented that her husband’s “greatest amusement was to play at portrait painting. . . he painted all the girls who came to visit us. He was quite wonderful at catching a likeness, which showed of course, his trained hand and eye in another line of work."

In 1911, French wrote to his close friend and former student, the sculptor Evelyn Beatrice Longman, “I have found time to get in quite a little painting and I can see that I am gaining on the thing quite fast. If I were twenty instead of sixty, I think I might make portrait painter of myself. It is great fun.” Today, French’s achievements in sculpture are well-known; his talent as a skilled portraitist in oil and pastel is a pleasant surprise.

Chesterwood, the historic home, studio, and gardens of Daniel Chester French, is the main repository for French’s oil paintings, and his pastel portraits are in the Chesterwood Works on Paper Collection at Chapin Library, Williams College.

Online exhibition created by Dana Pilson, Curatorial Researcher