Studio: international art (55.1912)

Daniel Chester French

AN AMERICAN SCULPTOR:
DANIEL CHESTER FRENCH.
BY SEIAVYN BRINTON, M.A.

Since the death of Augustus St. Gaudens I think
it may be fairly said that the artist who is the sub-
ject of my present notice stands at the head of
modern American sculpture. This is not to say
that there are not many brilliant men among the
younger workers whom the immense recent de-
velopment in the plastic arts has brought to the
front in America; but the position of Daniel
Chester French, both from his past record of
splendid achievement and from the consistently
lofty and serious aim of his monumental work, is
unique in America and approached by no other.

Perhaps the work of his earlier time which most
arrested public attention was Mr. French’s famous
relief (1891-92) of Death arresting the Hand of the
Sculptor, now at Forest Hill Cemetery, near Boston.
Death, a winged female figure, here arrests the
sculptor’s hand as he is about to strike with his
chisel : and here (as in St. Gaudens’ figure of a
woman at Rock Creek Cemetery, near Washington)
the veil adds breadth of shadow and imparts
solemnity. This fine work was exhibited at the
Columbian Exposition, where its serious dignity
and deep feeling must have contrasted with much
that was around; and here, too, was our artist’s
colossal creation of The Republic—a draped female
figure 65 feet in height—as well as four groups of
figures combined with animals, produced in col-
laboration with the well-known animal sculptor
Mr. Potter, among which I would instance the
group of an Tndian Woman beside a Bull as one of
the most brilliantly successful.

Anything like a detailed list of Mr. French’s
works would lead me far beyond the limits of
my present article. All that I can attempt here
is to single out a few of the most interesting,
among which I must certainly include his Alma
Maler of Columbia University, a draped female
figure conceived in the noblest classic spirit (re-
produced in The Studio for February 1907); his
Monument to Washington, commissioned by the
women of America, and erected in the Place
d’lena, Paris, an equestrian figure in which again
Mr. Potter collaborated; and the fine groups now
in front of the New York Customs House.

These groups, on which Mr. French was engaged
when I last visited him at Glendale, represent the
four continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, and
America, from all of which presumably (since the
McKinley tariff) the New York Customs claim

some slight pecuniary assistance. Perhaps the
most attractive among these groups are, not in-
appropriately, America and Europe. The former,
a seated female figure, with something ardent and
uncompromising in her very attitude, has behind
her an Indian who bends over her shoulder ; while
Eurobe, a queenly being, enthroned and crowned,
has as her comrade or attendant the shrouded
form of History, who holds a laurel-wreathed
human skull and a book. Her whole bearing is
regal in its dignity, though it lacks the intent
alertness of America. Africa, in contrast to these
robed queens, is a sleeping woman of Nubian type,
the upper part of her figure entirely nude ; she
rests her right arm upon the Sphinx, and behind
her a shrouded figure seems to hint at her yet
unknown future. It is so rarely that Mr. French

ALICE FREEMAN PALMER MEMORIAL

BY DANIEL CHESTER FRENCH

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