Exploring Chesterwood, Home of Lincoln Memorial Sculptor Daniel Chester French

This superb house museum keeps alive a master image maker.

T his past Memorial Day was the 100th anniversary of the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial, the zenith of the American monument movement that started not long after the end of the Civil War and ended around the Depression, when no one had any spare money and everyone was in a bad mood. Then, people tended to memorialize their last good meal.

For this story, rather than parse the building, a handsome, rousing success, or the sculpture of Lincoln, designed by Daniel Chester French, I’ll report on my visit to Chesterwood, French’s home and studio in Stockbridge in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts. French (1850–1931) was America’s premier monument maker during the Gilded Age. I went this weekend.

Chesterwood, owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, is a well-synchronized, evocative place where the spirit of the artist palpably moves among visitors and with an ease I don’t see or feel in many other house museums. This doesn’t happen by accident. It combines scholarship, clear communication, and a casual, outdoor vibe characteristic of the Berkshires in the summer.

French bought a 122-acre farm and house in 1896, building a commodious working studio where he did most of his work on dozens of projects, among them his iconic Lincoln. Chesterwood, as much as French’s sculptures, is the vision of the artist. He oversaw the design of his studio and his family house next to it and designed the lovely garden. My visit was as close to perfect as possible in this blighted world.

It’s rare for an artist to make one object more or less universally known, but French made two, and they bookend his career. At 24, and as a flippant, even flaky, inexperienced artist, he made The Minute Man, the larger-than-life bronze sculpture in Concord, Mass., memorializing the 100th anniversary of the North Bridge skirmish between a local militia and British troops, called “the shot heard around the world.” It speedily entered the nation’s visual vocabulary to mean readiness and courage among yeomen in defense of freedom. President Grant joined a crowd of 30,000 in Concord on April 19, 1875, to mark the anniversary, centered on the sculpture’s unveiling and to the horror of people in next-door Lexington, who believed the anniversary was properly theirs.

Maya Lin’s instant-savant fame is a close parallel, though French did her one better in making Everyman an avatar of patriotism. French was the son of Concord grandees. After flunking out from MIT, he studied briefly, though “interned” is correct, too, with John Quincy Adams Ward, William Rimmer, and Richard Morris Hunt. Living with his parents, he made pocket money designing cute, sentimental images for Parian tchotchkes. His big chance came when Ebenezer Hubbard, the Concord farmer who owned the land by the North Bridge, died in 1870. It grieved Hubbard deeply that the town, when building a monument to the Concord tussle in 1836, sited it where the British, not the heroic locals, had stood. He left a $1,000 bequest to create a new memorial on the right spot. Knowing the 100th anniversary was on the horizon, Concord decided to go big with a bronze on a plinth.

A local committee that included Ralph Waldo Emerson picked French without a competition. He was well known and liked locally. The man didn’t as much meet the moment as find it hand-delivered, wrapped with a bow.

French created The Minute Man first in clay and then in plaster, shipping it to a foundry to be translated into bronze before he left for two years of study with the American sculptor Thomas Ball in Florence. There, he learned technique and showed himself to be both a quick study of Italian art and a lifelong learner. French’s style is a fluid mix of the authentic and the soulful, or the physical and the spiritual. His father served a succession of Republican administrations in Washington, a connection that helped French get work making ornate figural sculptures decorating government buildings.

One early expertise was the personification of science, electricity, labor, knowledge, liberty, the continents, the wind, sky, sea, and even Manhattan and Brooklyn for the pylons decorating the new Manhattan Bridge. There, Manhattan is a big, pushy broad holding a globe and ship’s prow, symbols of international commerce, and accompanied by a peacock, a symbol of pride. Brooklyn’s the borough of churches and homes. French’s figure looks like a Wagner diva. A church spire backs her. She holds books. By her side is a lyre. She’s cultured and without sharp elbows.

French always did his research. The Minute Man’s costume is faithful down to his buttons and rolled-up sleeves since French studied colonial clothing, which, it seemed, every family in parsimonious Concord stored in their attics. In 1884, French made the seated full-length sculpture of John Harvard that now presides over Harvard Yard. Harvard, a minister, came to Cambridge in 1637 and died in 1638. Not a shred of evidence exists suggesting how he looked. French’s sculpture was a big hit. His subject looked like a Harvard man, erudite, serious, but, like most Boston Brahmins, both doughy and drawn. French used the son of Harvard’s board president as a model. French’s details, down to his subject’s skull cap, were scrupulously of John Harvard’s time. Otherwise, a Harvard man would’ve made that known with pleasure.

French’s funerary monuments are solemn, of course, but soothing. In the early 1890s, he designed The Angel of Death and the Sculptor, a memorial at the grave of Martin Milmore, a Boston sculptor who died at 38. It’s a heavily draped winged angel standing by the agile, buff young artist at the peak of his career and about to give his chisel a whack. The angel puts her hand on the chisel, a gesture saying “el fin” with no ifs, ands, or buts. His Melvin Memorial in a Concord cemetery remembers three brothers killed while fighting for the Union. French finished it in 1909. A nine-foot-tall, partially nude woman representing Victory emerges in high relief from her flag drapery. She’s somber, eyes closed since she’s meditating, but languid and sexy. The boys get the girl at the end.

If I were to tag French with a style, I’d call him an American Art Nouveau sculptor. His forms are sinuous but restrained and flowing rather than asymmetrical. He and his family took long yearly trips to Europe. Even in the 1890s, when French was established, rich, and famous, he took art classes in Paris. He worshipped Rodin. Emotionally, his work has a range. His Spirit of Life, a female figure cast in bronze in 1914 for a memorial in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., is saucy but not tabasco. America’s default aesthetic is Neoclassicism. This will always drag our art from irrational exuberance. French admired Bouguereau, Cabanel, and Rodin, and drew inspiration from them, but the Yankee in him invariably tapped the brakes.

Next to The Minute Man and the Lincoln Memorial’s Lincoln, his most famous sculpture is the Republic, from 1893, the 65-foot-high — 110 if we count the base — centerpiece of the World’s Colombian Exposition. It was the biggest statue in the biggest exposition in history. She’s the beacon light of America’s looming hegemony — austere, even grave, and very unsaucy. Everything at the White City, the site of the exposition, was ephemeral. Republic was trashed soon after the fair but a bronze version of it, refilled in 1993 with 24,000 sheets of gold leaf, is in Chicago’s Jackson Park.

Chesterwood comes in multiple parts. First, the visitor center is one of the most effective I’ve seen. Through crisp and clear wall panels, we learn about French’s prosperous, middle-class New England upbringing. Then comes his love of precise detail and his aesthetic restraint. There’s a good balance between chronology and specific projects such as The Minute Man and the Lincoln project on the one hand and aesthetics on the other. Second, French’s house, which he designed and which replaced an old farmhouse, was closed for renovation when I was there. I’m told it’s comfortable, even lovely, but not distinguished.

Berkshire living is outdoor living. French and his family religiously spent six months of the year at Chesterwood, from May through October. The Frenches and their guests divided social time among shaded patios and porches, the breeziest called the Piazza. Chesterwood is on the brow of a hill with a good view of distant hills. Porches and patios have nice wicker chairs. French invested in Chesterwood what he called “a love of placidity.” It’s a love we can still experience today. That’s a feat. Chesterwood doesn’t press needless messaging on us. It’s not a controlling place.

For me, and I think for serious art lovers, the high point of Chesterwood is French’s studio. It’s not as French left it, though on the day I visited, the National Sculpture Society was there for a conference. Artists were giving demonstrations, so I was able to see clay modeling and marble carving. Chesterwood is an educational institution and hosts classes and workshops in the studio all season long.

The studio is filled with French’s working models, mostly plasters, so visitors get a survey of his work. This is enriching in two ways. We’re seeing French’s development as an artist but also his role in production. French was an entrepreneur and small businessman, the idea man and designer. He made his clay figures by hand, and these went through refinements as he moved to plaster casts. His finished, statue-sized plaster casts either went to a foundry to be cast in bronze or to his team of marble cutters if they were stone. French picked his marble blocks and finished his bronzes by hand, which meant tweaking details.

French once defined a sculptor as “a man nine-tenths mechanic and one-tenth poet,” which, putting aside his creative modesty, means that art-making is a technical business. His studio is a spacious workspace and suitable to show to guests, among them clients, but it’s still a practical space. Blessedly, there’s almost no text in the studio. I loved seeing his tools, sink, and potter’s wheel as well as five models for his Lincoln, starting with a soft clay model and finishing with a final plaster cast. I also loved seeing the submerged indoor track and rotating platform French specially built to roll his work on the track outdoors through floor-to-ceiling double doors so he could see it as the sun moved. So nifty.

French didn’t treat his employment of marble carvers as a secret, and neither does Chesterwood. For years he used a family of Italian immigrant carvers called the Piccirilli Brothers; all six were part of a business that started during the Renaissance. With a workshop in Mott Haven in the Bronx, the brothers followed French’s model, pointed geometrically to instruct on looks and scale.

The Piccirillis carved Lincoln. They worked for French, George Grey Barnard, Frederick MacMonnies, Cass Gilbert, Stanford White, and Carrère and Hastings, all big names, and lots of small clients looking for just the right look for Woodlawn Cemetery, also in the Bronx. French had a corps of studio assistants. On projects such as the Melvin Memorial and the Lincoln Memorial, where his sculpture lives in a built environment, French collaborated closely with architects.

In Washington, the stars never aligned for a memorial to Lincoln until the centennial, in 1909, of Lincoln’s birth. Politicians from the white-supremacist, Lost Cause South resisted. No one could agree on the site. The centennial came and went, with momentum slipping from sheer embarrassment. The 50th anniversary of Lincoln’s death and the Civil War’s end would happen in 1915. Congress finally appropriated the money in 1911.

French was always the front-runner to make the Lincoln sculpture. He’d done substantial equestrian monuments of Ulysses S. Grant and George Washington, praised by critics for their faithful likeness as well as the subjects’ grace under pressure. His Grant, like the general, is posed like an Everyman but has a face as taut and ruthless as a trap. Washington is more elegant, even bravura, his arm raised in triumph. French’s only Paris commission, it still commands the intersection at Place D’Iéna in Paris.

In 1912, French had also created a life-size standing bronze of Lincoln for the grounds of the Nebraska State Capitol. Lincoln’s head is bowed, his hands folded in front of him. He looks as if he’s praying, and he might have been, but French learned that Lincoln stood this way while being introduced to speak. For this Lincoln, French used a copy of a life mask made of Lincoln’s face in 1860. Lincoln called it “the animal itself” for its accuracy. Bacon, his architect collaborator on so many projects, was already hired for the Lincoln Memorial job in D.C.

French had done dozens of memorials to the country’s great and good. Unlike John Harvard, most of his subjects were well known. Critics, donors, families, and friends praised his skill in ennobled likeness. French was nearly a victim of his own assiduously stewarded connections. He chaired the federal Fine Arts Commission, empowered not to select Lincoln’s sculptor — that was Bacon’s job — but to approve the design. All went smoothly and, for Washington in the Teens, ethically. When the final design came to the commission, French was admiring the cherry blossoms.

French obsessively researched. For his Lincoln in Nebraska, he was happy to use Lincoln’s life mask, though beardless, and more or less call it a day. He knew his D.C. Lincoln would be the commission of a lifetime and, since he was then in his mid-60s, a valedictory. He heard from old men who’d known Lincoln. When I wrote about Ford’s Theatre in April, I mentioned that more than 5,000 books have been written about Lincoln. Even in the Teens, many hundreds had appeared, some, such as Herndon’s Lincoln, by Lincoln’s one-time law partner, describing his look, his clothes, even his feet, which were huge. French found unknown photographs of Lincoln. He used life casts of Lincoln’s hands, too.

French’s new Lincoln wouldn’t look down but ahead, as if in a trance, head bowed a smidgen for the benefit of the viewer, but his eyes fixed on the Mall and beyond. Lincoln wouldn’t stand. French had already done that, as had Augustus Saint-Gaudens. A standing Lincoln would look puny in Bacon’s building, wide and low like the Parthenon with twelve Doric columns for a façade. Another vertical wouldn’t make sense. By seating Lincoln, French and the public got more of him. In 1920, French sent his final model to the Piccirillis to be carved in 28 big Georgia-marble blocks, and then he went to Sicily for a holiday that included his daughter’s wedding.

President Harding led the dedication along with William Howard Taft, the former president and then–chief justice, who had also chaired the Lincoln Memorial Commission. Lincoln’s elderly son, Robert, was there. He’d seen a model and liked it but professed himself awed by the final result. The dedication, drawing 50,000 people, was segregated. Confederate and Union veterans, all old, got front-row seats. Speeches emphasized reconciliation and unity. Taft was an especially outrageous blowhard, saying that in 1922 Lincoln was “as dear to the hearts of the South as to those of the North.” Robert Moton, Booker T. Washington’s successor as principal of the Tuskegee Industrial School, was the only African-American speaker. He’d planned to note how hearty Jim Crow was and to observe that without obliterating white supremacy, the Lincoln Memorial would be “a hollow mockery, a symbol of hypocrisy.” Taft insisted that Moton excise all barbs, and Moton complied. After his speech, park rangers escorted him from the row of dignitaries on stage to the blacks-only section.

“Work done, victory won,” French wrote in imagining Lincoln’s thoughts at the moment the sculptor contrived. The museum section of Chesterwood tells the story.

I’ll underscore how good the museum is, on the Lincoln Memorial and every other phase of French’s career. The only thing I didn’t like was the audio component. Tucked in a corner is a niche on the Lincoln Memorial post-dedication. Short audio clips are activated by pushing a button. Marian Anderson is there, and rightly so. Her concert in 1939 established the Lincoln Memorial as a venue for resistance propelled by principle. Of course, there’s a moment with Martin Luther King when he gave his “I Have a Dream” speech there in 1963. The slimy opportunist John Kerry speaks, too, at the war protest occurring after he threw his medals into the Potomac in 1971. Talk about bloviators. Eleanor Smeal has a clip from 1980 speaking in favor of the defunct Equal Rights Amendment. Anderson and King are timeless, Kerry and Smeal aren’t.

I’d rethink this section, update it with clips of substance by people of substance. Or ditch the audio section for a video showing part of Anderson’s concert as well as the passage of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington shot at the memorial and a clip of King’s speech. Chesterwood has the talent and smarts for this. There’s already a good video on its website. In 2019, Chesterwood commissioned a super biography of French by Harold Holzer, the esteemed and always readable biographer of Lincoln. Like all of Holzer’s books, and I’ve read every one, it’s the ultimate authority. It’s a fine biography as well as the best handbook on Chesterwood.

French’s last sculpture, a full-length marble Andromeda, is at Chesterwood. He couldn’t find a buyer, though I wonder why since she looks like Marilyn Monroe’s early modeling for Playboy. Aside from this, is there anything about Andromeda that’s remotely Modernist? There are Renoir’s late nudes, of course, but I’d say French took advantage of a moment when taste was at its least chaste. French was an artist of variousness and managed to find a place in the Roaring Twenties.

Is Chesterwood relevant? Of course it is. First of all, the place is elegantly and intelligently curated. The site’s a calming presence, as French wished. French is a fine artist, and the place is an immersion in his creative world. His style couldn’t have been more old-fashioned in the post-war era, but I’m all for eclecticism. And pendulums swing. Monuments are in the news, too, and fake history is in our schools. French’s years provide teaching moments aplenty, and not of the lying, hateful 1619 Project ilk. Much of French’s work treats memory and loss. These are things of the soul and always of interest.