In 1914,
Daniel Chester French was selected by the Lincoln Memorial Committee to create a Lincoln statue as part of the memorial to be designed by architect
Henry Bacon (1866–1924). French was already famous for his 1874
The Minute Man statue in
Concord, Massachusetts, and his 1884
John Harvard statue in
Harvard Yard on the campus of
Harvard University. He was also the personal choice of Bacon, who had already been collaborating with him for nearly 25 years. French resigned his chairmanship of the
Fine Arts Commission in Washington, D.C., a group closely affiliated with the memorial's design and creation — and commenced work in December. French had already created (1909–1912) a major memorial statue of Lincoln—this one standing—for the
Nebraska State Capitol (
Abraham Lincoln, 1912) in
Lincoln, Nebraska. His previous studies of Lincoln—which included biographies, photographs, and a
life mask of Lincoln by
Leonard Volk done in 1860—had prepared him for the challenging task of the larger statue. He and Bacon decided that a large seated figure would be most appropriate for the national memorial. French started with a small clay study and subsequently created several plaster models, making subtle changes in the figure's pose or setting. He placed Lincoln not in an ordinary 19th-century seat but in a classical chair, including
fasces, a Roman symbol of authority, to convey that the subject was an eminence for all the ages. Three plaster models of the Lincoln statue are at French's
Chesterwood Studio, a
National Trust Historic Site in
Stockbridge, Massachusetts, including a plaster sketch (1915) and a six-foot plaster model (1916). The second of French's plasters, created at Chesterwood in the summer of 1916 (inscribed October 31), became the basis of the final work, which was initially envisioned as a bronze. In deciding the size of the final statue, French and Bacon took photographic enlargements of the model to the memorial under construction. Eventually, French's longtime collaborators, the firm of
Piccirilli Brothers, were commissioned to do the carving of a much larger sculpture in marble from a quarry near
Tate, Georgia. French's design took a year to transfer to the massive marble blocks. French provided finishing strokes in the carvers' studio in
The Bronx, New York City and after the statue was assembled in the memorial on the National Mall in 1920. Lighting the statue was a particular problem. In creating the work, French had understood that a large
skylight would provide direct, natural illumination from overhead, but this was not included in the final plans. The horizontal light from the east flattened Lincoln's facial features—making him appear to stare blankly rather than wear a dignified expression—and highlighted his shins. French considered this a disaster. In the end, an arrangement of electric lights was devised to correct this situation. The work was unveiled at the memorial's formal dedication on May 30, 1922. ==Legends==