Books of the Week #34 and #35

Daniel Chester French was a leading American sculptor of the late 19th century. He was born in Exeter, NH and is best known for his 1922 sculpture "Lincoln."
The two major sources about his life were written by his wife and his daughter.

Memories of a A Sculptor's Wife by Mrs. Daniel Chester French (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, The Riverside Press Cambridge, 1928).

Mary French, a cousin of Daniel Chester French and later his wife, begins her reminiscences with her childhood in Washington, DC at the time of President Lincoln's assassination and writes about her various friends in Washington, including Frances Hodgson Burnett. She also writes briefly about the time she and her husband spent in New Hampshire. The World's Fair she refers to was the Chicago World's Fair (1892).

"Two of those summers, the one before the World's Fair and the one after, we spent in Cornish, New Hampshire, which we loved, but which was too far from New York for us to adopt as our home. Cornish was, in my day, and of course still is, a community rather than a village, a scattering group of houses among the New Hampshire hills. There was not even what we might call a settlement; occasionally two or three houses near together, but most of them like small country estates, wide apart. For the mail and for whatever small business affairs there were, we drove down long hills, and along flat river-banks, and through an old ramshackle covered bridge, into the town of Windsor." (Memories of a Sculptor's Wife, p. 181)

The Life of Daniel Chester French: Journey into Fame by Margaret French Cresson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1947).

This is a more straitforward biography of French, but as it is written by his daughter cannot be supposed to be particularily objective. It has a charming story-telling tone to it and covers French's life in a traditional biographic format from his snowsculpting adventures as a child through his death in 1931. A list of French's works, a bibliography, and several photographs are included.

This book-of the-week post is part of a series related to the Cornish Art Colony. The Center for the Book compiled a bibliography on the Cornish Colony in support of the exhibit currently at the library.