Art: Popular Blend

On a blue spring evening in Exeter, N.H. in 1850, Judge Henry Flagg French sat thoughtfully composing a letter to his brother. “Will you be so kind,” he wrote, “as to ask Bess in what order I had determined to use up the family names for my boys. They come along so slowly that I have most forgotten. One of them was born yesterday morning at six o’clock, and I believe the name of Daniel is due to him.”

The judge didn’t know it, but the infant whose name was in question, yowling upstairs, was to be a famous sculptor. The clenched red hands of young Daniel Chester French would one day mold Concord’s familiar Minute Man, John Harvard at Cambridge, and the seated Lincoln for Washington’s Lincoln Memorial. He would live 81 fortunate years, and his wife and daughter would each write a book about him. Daniel’s daughter, Margaret French Cresson, herself a sculptor, has written the better book, Journey into Fame (Harvard University Press; $4.50), published this week.

Talent on the Table. Daniel never did very well at school; for a while his family wondered what would become of him. Then one day when he was about 17, Daniel put beside his father’s plate a turnip whittled to resemble a frog, in tail coat and trousers. “This,” the judge exclaimed, “really looks like talent!”

Next day Judge French brought home a lump of clay for Daniel to practice on, and for seven years Daniel practiced diligently. When the family moved to Concord, dashing May Alcott (Louisa’s sister), who had studied sculpture in Paris, gave him a few pointers, and Neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson too was moved to smile on Daniel’s work. That was enough. Writes Margaret: “With that fine conviction in their own capacity to produce the best . . . Concord commissioned its youthful representative of the plastic art to model a statue of a Minute Man. . . .”

Fame on the Fly. President Grant and most of his Cabinet were on hand for the unveiling; Emerson and James Russell Lowell sat with them. “This is Fame, Dan!” Judge French counseled his 24-year-old son: “Make the most of it, for you don’t know how long it will last.”

It was a long time before Daniel again managed so lively looking a bronze as the Minute Man, but his fame was already as secure as the statue itself. He made as much as $80,000 in a year. His sculpture did not have the clean perfection of the Greeks or the fire of Rodin, but it was recognizably romantic and faintly classical—a popular blend. Daniel achieved his greatest sculptural triumph—the Lincoln Memorial statue—at 70.

The 19-ft. Lincoln, slumped comfortably in “a Roman chair, embodies the best in Daniel French’s art. Despite its size, the statue looks human enough to be a real person—somehow marbleized. The quiet hands rest loosely, and inappropriately, on chair arms ornamented with bundled rods in bas-relief: symbols of Rome’s imperial power. The dramatic spotlighting, which the sculptor fiddled with for seven years after his Lincoln was installed, lends mystery to what is essentially a competent, straightforward portrait; Daniel was never one to take liberties with his subjects. “He was all for tradition and a grave, measured style,” says daughter Margaret. “He could no more have gone in for ‘self-expression’ than he could have walked naked down Fifth Avenue.”