‘First graduate of MAC’ sculpted Concord's Minute Man
By Daniel J. Fitzgibbons
As the first president of Massachusetts Agricultural College, Henry Flagg French’s days were usually occupied more with planning the school and political haggling than farming. The New Hampshire-born lawyer and amateur farmer was ill-equipped for the mission of building a land-grant college and resigned after just two years in Amherst.
Though MAC’s first class did not enroll until a year after French’s departure, a visitor to the fledgling campus in 1865 might well have noticed a young man attending to the daily chores of the college farm. Daniel Chester French was 14 when he moved to Amherst with his father and stepmother. In those early days of the institution, it was only Daniel French who was schooled in the progressive agricultural methods that so intrigued his father. So Henry French sometimes referred to his son as “the first graduate of MAC.”
At the time, few would have guessed that young Daniel French would become one of the country’s preeminent sculptors, whose works include the statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial and the Minute Man at the North Bridge in Concord.
After leaving Amherst, the Frenches moved to Concord, where their neighbors included Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Alcotts. Young Daniel enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but his first year was a disaster. He failed three courses and returned home and worked the family farm.
Recognizing French’s latent artistic talent, family friend and artist Abigail May Alcott began encouraging the young man to pursue sculpting. She gave him her modeling clay and tools and advice on how to use them.
A quick learner, French studied drawing with William Morris Hunt and anatomy with William Rimmer in Boston and worked in the Brooklyn, N.Y. studio of John Quincy Adams Ward. His earliest subjects were his family and friends, who sat for portrait busts.
French’s professional breakthrough came in 1873 when the town of Concord, urged on by Emerson, commissioned a sculpture of a colonial minuteman. In the early fall of 1874, he had completed his even-foot model for the statue and the plaster figure was sent to a foundry in Chicopee.
The statue was unveiled two years later to mark the centenary of the Battle of Concord. While President Grant and 10,000 spectators attended the ceremony, but French was in Florence, Italy, continuing his studies with artist Thomas Ball.
The work drew attention to the young artist and the plaster model was displayed in Boston and Philadelphia and a casting was exhibited at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876.
Upon his return to the U.S. the following year, French set up a studio in Washington, D.C., where his father was serving as assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury. He resettled in Concord in 1878, and in 1879 built a studio next to his family’s home. Other trips to Europe and a newfound friendship with sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens spurred more ambitious work by French. In 1888, he completed a statute of General Lewis Cass commissioned by the state of Michigan for display in the U.S. Capitol.
By the turn of the 20th century, French was the nation’s leading monumental sculptor. His works include the statue of John Harvard at Harvard University, Alma Mater at Columbia University, and of course, the marble seated figure of Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial.
In 1896, French purchased a farm in Stockbridge that he used as a summer home and studio. He spent 34 summers at Chesterwood until he died there in 1931. Today, he remembered for developing a style of naturalism in his sculpture that was a welcome counter to the prevailing neoclassical idealism.
And though almost no biographies of the artist even mention French’s short stay in Amherst, the campus can still take some measure of pride in its “Minute Man” connection.
July 1, 2004.
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