Daniel Chester French

Daniel Chester French was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, on 20 April 1850 and grew up in Massachusetts. He studied sculpture in Boston, New York, and briefly in Italy, and in 1875, still a young man, he completed the Minute Man for Concord, Massachusetts, a bronze figure of a militiaman at the outbreak of the Revolution. Over a long career he made statues and memorials for town greens, cemeteries, and public buildings across the United States. His best-known work is the 19-foot seated statue of Abraham Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., dedicated on 30 May 1922. The National Park Service notes that he studied photographs, eyewitness accounts, and casts of Lincoln’s hands in order to show both strength and compassion. French’s studio at Chesterwood, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, is preserved. He died on 7 October 1931.

See also: Abraham Lincoln · Augustus Saint-Gaudens