Daniel Chester French

Daniel Chester French (1850–1931) created the most recognized sculpture in the United States: the seated Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial. Born in Exeter, New Hampshire, and raised in Concord, Massachusetts, he grew up as a neighbor of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Alcott family. Abigail May Alcott (Louisa May's sister) gave him his first modeling supplies.

His formal training was remarkably brief. About a month with sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward, some evening classes at the National Academy of Design, and two years working in Florence. That was it. Yet at 25, he completed The Minute Man (1875) for the centennial of the Battle of Concord. Cast from ten melted-down Civil War cannons, it became a national icon, appearing on World War II defense bonds and stamps.

French spent the next five decades as America's most prolific public sculptor. His 65-foot Republic towered over the 1893 Columbian Exposition. He carved Alma Mater for Columbia University and the seated John Harvard (working without any image of the actual man). The Lincoln Memorial (dedicated 1922) took eight years to complete. French built four scale models and visited the site with photographs to determine that the statue needed to be 19 feet tall to fill the space. He died in 1931 at Chesterwood, his Berkshires estate, now a museum of his work.