I recently read Monument Man: The Life & Art of Daniel Chester French, the long-awaited first authoritative biography of my favorite sculptor, who at his death in 1931 a New York Times writer hailed as a “distinctively American ‘apostle of beauty.’” While a review that closely reflects what I wanted to write about the book has been published, I’m still eager to share my thoughts on why that writer’s designation is so apt.
We read biographies about notable people, including our favorite artists, to understand them and their inspirational work more deeply. We’re hungry to discover something more fundamental about them, say, through how they approached challenges in their careers and personal lives, which can also tell us more about their art, all providing valuable lessons we may find useful. These are major features of biographies and why I, unlike other reviewers, praised author Walter Isaacson for summarizing Leonardo da Vinci’s distinctive attributes in his biography on the Renaissance man.
The first comprehensive biography about the sculptor was commissioned by the trustees at Chesterwood, French’s home and studio in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, that was given to the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1969.
Written by historian and Lincoln scholar Howard Holzer, Monument Man introduced me to several French’s sculptures that I never knew about and revealed intriguing details about his creative processes and how he landed commissions. Most interestingly, though, Holzer clearly confirmed what I’d long suspected about French—the son, husband, father, friend, collaborator and artist—based on my limited knowledge of him and my enthusiasm for his most inspiring work.
First, I learned that French, who carved a reputation as America’s premier sculptor during his lifetime, was reticent and rarely described his aesthetic creations nor explained their themes to others. He virtually never gave speeches at ceremonial dedications of his monuments, even for his most celebrated work, the colossal seated marble of Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., whose classical structure was designed by his longtime architect colleague Henry Bacon. French believed his work spoke for itself.
And if his subjects in marble and bronze could speak, they would say beauty was not merely a fleeting pleasure for their creator, but rather a supreme, guiding value that permeated his life. What Holzer’s portrait of French demonstrates, above all else, is that he had an eager eye for beauty in all its forms—whether in the work of fellow artists, including his contemporary Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the woman he married and the women who modeled for him at his studios, and the mountainous countryside view that he built his summer home and estate, Chesterwood, to face.
French’s life teaches us to put beauty on pedestals, as he literally did with his sculptures that also evoke the heroic and the ideal—from the handsome and iconic Minute Man statue, his first commissioned monument commemorating the Battle of Concord, to the sensuous nude lying on a rock embodying Andromeda of Greek mythology, his last completed work before his death at age 81.
Andromeda in the artist’s studio at Chesterwood. The sculptor completed the work before his death in 1931.
“I still believe that the beauty of woman is beauty at its best and highest,” French told a reporter as he worked on Andromeda. (p. 304)
Whatever his subject, French appears to have always strived to evoke the beautiful, ideal and heroic, often capturing this trio of aesthetic values together, lending his figures a certain dignity and romanticism.
A reverse replica of Mourning Victory, the centerpiece of French’s Melvin Memorial monument, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Even French’s somber subjects, such as fallen soldiers, were created with a sense of beauty. Exemplary is his Melvin Memorial that honors three brothers killed during the Civil War fighting for the Union cause. This monument, at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts, features an allegorical relief he named Mourning Victory, a semi-nude female figure holding aloft a sprig of laurel while emerging from under an American flag, which was “not meant to suggest the act of regretting triumph, as it is sometimes misrepresented, but to describe a figure representing ‘triumph’ who laments her dead,” writes Holzer. (p. 220)
It is telling of French’s central purpose in life that his gravestone at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery simply reads “A Heritage of Beauty.”
“I still believe that the beauty of woman is beauty at its best and highest.”
Born in New Hampshire in 1850, French witnessed dramatic and remarkable changes unfold during his lifetime, from the Civil War, Emancipation and Reconstruction to the full flowering of the Industrial Revolution that delivered innovations, developments, wealth creation and a rise in the general quality and longevity of life unprecedented in world history. Overall, despite the ongoing problems and injustices of history’s freest nation, this was indeed a generally promising time to live. I had hoped Holzer may have explored in greater depth the changes and general optimistic spirit of this era as a major undercurrent of French’s work.
The biographer also only touches on another significant phenomenon that occurred during French’s long and distinguished career: a dramatic but undesirable shift in the art world.
The Milmore Memorial (or Death Staying the Hand of the Sculptor) is a marble reproduction of the bronze original. French produced this piece for the permanent collection at the Met.
As a burgeoning young American artist, French traveled to Italy and France to study their masterpieces and to train in the neoclassical style. But Europeans were starting to reject that form in favor of less clearly defined and blotched figures and scenes, popularized by Rodin and Monet. By the 20th century, though, these modernist changes descended into the non-representational, often with dispirited subjects, some of which can be objectively classified as non-art, or even representational pieces that were anti-art—and anti-beauty. Observe Marcel Ducamp’s Fountain, a urinal posing as sculpture that personifies how far the art world had plunged down a toilet.
Holzer animates French’s distaste for this degeneration of art primarily through a Henri Matisse exhibition the sculptor attended at a New York City gallery in the year of his death. “I think that altogether it is the greatest insult to intelligence that I have ever met,” French wrote of the exhibit to his studio assistant. (p. 306)
A maquette of French’s Immortal Love at Chesterwood, the full marble version of which was displayed at Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C.
Unlike some of his contemporaries, Picasso among them, French was never enticed by this world.
He remained loyal to his aesthetic values, an unbreached commitment to the representational and the romantic, even in his waning years when he created some of his most beautiful work, Andromeda included.
“For certain, he viewed the statue [Andromeda] as his last, and hopefully, best argument for preserving the tradition of the ideal in art,” Holzer writes. (p. 306)
Despite that Holzer understates these significant developments and changes that revolved around French during his career, his biography nonetheless accomplishes what is most important by highlighting the defining attributes of this dignified man and great artist, demonstrating that both were one and the same.
All photos: © Joseph Kellard/kellardmedia.com