FRENCH, DANIEL CHESTER (185o1931), American sculptor, was born at Exeter (N.H.), on April 20, 1850, the son of Henry Flagg French, a lawyer, who for a time was assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury. After a year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, French spent a month in the studio of John Q. A. Ward, then began to work on commissions, and at the age of 23 received from the town of Concord, Mass., an order for his well-known statue, "The Minute Man," which was unveiled (April 19, 1875) on the centenary of the battle of Concord. Previ ously French had gone to Florence, Italy, where he spent a year with Thomas Ball. French's best-known work is "Death Staying the Hand of the Sculptor," a memorial for the tomb of the sculptor Martin Milmore, in the Forest Hills cemetery, Boston.
Among French's early works are : a monument to John Boyle O'Reilly, Boston; "Gen. Cass," National hall of statuary, Wash ington; "Dr. Gallaudet and his First Deaf-Mute Pupil" (Wash ington) ; the colossal "Statue of the Republic," for the Columbian exposition at Chicago; statues of Rufus Choate (Boston), John Harvard (Cambridge, Mass.), and Thomas Starr King (San Fran cisco, Calif.) ; a memorial to the architect Richard M. Hunt, New York; and a large "Alma Mater," near the approach to Columbia university, New York. His important recent works are the four groups, Europe, America, Asia and Africa, for the New York custom-house; the Melvin memorial at Concord, Mass. (1916) ; the 1st Division war memorial, Washington, D.C. (1924) ; and the statue "Memory" (1911) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1920 he completed his statue of Lincoln for the Lincoln memorial, Washington, D.C., and in 1922 his statue of Lafayette.
See LoRAno TAFT, The History of American Sculpture (19o3, 2nd ed., 1924) ; MRS. W. H. FRENCH, Memories of a Sculptor's Wife (1928).