Chesterwood, Daniel Chester French's Studio
Near Great Barrington, Massachusetts
Down a wooded lane from the center of Stockbridge, a man who shaped how America literally imagines Abraham Lincoln spent his summers working in a hilltop studio with a railroad track running through it.
Daniel Chester French purchased a hundred and fifty acres here in eighteen ninety-six and commissioned his friend Henry Bacon to design a studio. Bacon would later design the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. French would fill it with the statue inside. The partnership between these two men produced, arguably, the most recognizable piece of public art in America.
French had been producing public sculpture since eighteen seventy-five, when his Minute Man was unveiled in Concord, Massachusetts, a commission he won at twenty-three years old. By the time he came to Stockbridge he was the country's preeminent sculptor of civic monuments. His output over the next three decades ran to more than a hundred public works, including allegorical figures for the Chicago World's Fair, university buildings, and war memorials across the country.
The studio Bacon designed for him at Chesterwood was built with a specific problem in mind. Sculptors who work indoors often find that a piece completed under artificial light looks entirely different outside. French addressed this by installing a standard-gauge railroad track on which he could roll large sculptures out through the barn doors into natural daylight for assessment, then wheel them back in to make adjustments. It was a practical engineering solution to an aesthetic problem.
The seated Lincoln was modeled here in nineteen eighteen and nineteen nineteen. French worked at a scale of one-to-twelve in plaster, studying how each position of the head and hands read from a distance of several hundred feet. When the Lincoln Memorial opened in nineteen twenty-two, French was seventy-two years old.
His daughter Margaret donated Chesterwood to the National Trust for Historic Preservation in nineteen sixty-eight. The studio remains largely unchanged.
