The French family moved to Concord, Massachusetts, in the early 1860s. It was May Alcott, artist and younger sister of the popular author Louisa May Alcott, who advised the young Daniel Chester French to develop his demonstrated talent by trying his hand at modeling small figures of animals and busts of friends. He soon realized the seriousness of his artistic inclinations, and in 1870 he convinced John Quincy Adams Ward, who was fast becoming America's premier sculptor, to accept him as a student in his New York studio. Although this alliance lasted for only one month, it set French on a steady professional course and began a lifelong friendship. For so young and relatively inexperienced a sculptor, the commission given him in 1873 by the citizens of Concord for the Minute Man was an extraordinary opportunity. The work, unveiled on the centenary of the April 1775 battle that began the Revolutionary War, was an auspicious debut.
French had gone to Florence the previous year. There he worked in the studio of Thomas Ball and learned much from his exposure to classical and Renaissance sculptures. He returned to America in 1876 and went to Washington, D.C., but retained his ties with Concord and Boston. His father, by then an assistant secretary of the United States Treasury, helped him obtain commissions to produce decorative groups for several federal buildings. He also executed a number of portraits of prominent residents of Massachusetts. He exhibited at the Academy for the first time in the annual of 1879 and continued to be represented in Academy shows, albeit irregularly, well into the 1920s.
The commission from Harvard University for a life-size sculpture of John Harvard, unveiled in 1884, marked the beginning of French's rise to national prominence. In 1886 he went to Paris for about ten months. He was working on an American commission, but the main purpose of the sojourn was to study and learn from the works of the major contemporary French sculptors. Shortly after his return, he acquired a home and studio in New York. Over the next decade, he produced a number of major public sculptures, including: the Thomas Gallaudet Memorial, Gallaudet College, Washington, D.C. (1889); the Milmore Memorial, Forest Hills Cemetery, Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts (1893); Republic, Triumph of Columbia, and Agriculture for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago; and the Richard Morris Hunt Memorial at Seventieth Street and Fifth Avenue, New York, commissioned in 1896 but not fully installed until 1901.
French's participation in the Columbian Exposition marked the beginning of his long-term working connection with the architect Charles McKim. (The architect with whom he would most often collaborate, however, was Henry Bacon.) His collaborator on Agriculture and Triumph of Columbia, Edward C. Potter, had been his assistant on John Harvard and would work with French again on various major monuments.
In 1897 French bought property near Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he built a home and studio; thereafter he spent six months each year at Chesterwood, as the compound was named, and the other six, winter months in New York. Over the remaining thirty-four years of French's life, his commissions seemed to grow ever more prestigious and monumental. Among the outstanding works of this period were the allegorical image Alma Mater for Columbia University (1903); four figural groups representing the continents for the exterior of Cass Gilbert's United States Customs House, New York (1907); and Brooklyn and Manhattan for the Manhattan Bridge spanning those New York boroughs (1916). French's crowning achievement was among his last, and fittingly it remains the work with which he is most identified: the colossal Abraham Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C., dedicated in 1922.
In the years when the Academy was headquartered and held its exhibitions in its building at Twenty-third Street and Fourth Avenue-which could not comfortably accommodate large sculptures-French rarely participated in its annual exhibitions. He showed an allegorical piece in 1879 and portrait busts in 1888, 1889, and 1890. After the turn of the century, when the Academy began holding shows in the galleries of the Fine Arts Building, it strove to include more sculpture in its exhibitions. French was represented in the 1901 annual and regularly thereafter through 1921.
His renown was commensurate with the quantity, scale, and power of his work. After the death in 1907 of his friend Augustus Saint-Gaudens, French became America's preeminent sculptor.
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