Daniel Chester French Home and Studio

Daniel Chester French Home and Studio
National Register of Historic Places
National Historic Landmark District
	The house in 2007
location	Stockbridge , Massachusetts , United States
Coordinates	42 ° 17 '5.6 " N , 73 ° 21' 16" W Coordinates: 42 ° 17 '5.6 " N , 73 ° 21' 16" W.
surface	129.02 acres (52.2 hectares )
Built	1901
architect	Henry Bacon
Architectural style	Georgian Revival
NRHP number	66000652
Data
The NRHP added	October 15, 1966
As NHLD declared	December 21, 1965

The former home and studio of the American sculptor Daniel Chester French is registered in the National Register of Historic Places as Daniel Chester French Home and Studio (also Chesterwood ) . The original farm in the city of Stockbridge in the state of Massachusetts of the United States served French from 1896 until his death in 1931 as a residence and was jointly in 1965 with the surrounding land as a National Historic Landmark District recognized. The house and grounds are now owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation .

description

Insight into the studio, 2007

The property is located north of Monument Mountain and the Housatonic River approximately 2 miles (3.2 km) west of Stockbridge city center. Of the original 60 hectares that French acquired in 1896, around 52 hectares are still available today. The property is divided in an east-west direction by Williamsville Road.

Henry Bacon designed the studio for French on his new estate in 1897. The wooden frame is plastered with plaster of paris , to which bits of marble and coal have been added to create a texture . The central element of the studio is the work room, which has a square base with an edge length of a good 9 meters and has a tent roof .

Particularly noteworthy are the more than 9 meter high double doors in the western wall and the rotating work table, which is mounted on rails that lead to the outside through the double door. In this way, Daniel French was able to examine his current work in daylight. The first statue he made in this studio was a 9-meter-high equestrian statue of George Washington , which today stands on Place d'Iéna in Paris .

To the east of the studio is French's house, which he had built in 1901 - also by Bacon - as a replacement for the farmhouse from 1820, which had been in the same place up to that point. The two-and-a-half-story building was designed in the style of the Georgian Revival and is plastered with the same plaster mixture as the studio. The hipped roof has a balustrade and is broken through by a total of five dormers . The living room is an exact copy of the corresponding room in his childhood home in Chester, New Hampshire .

Daniel Chester French is best known in the United States for his Minute Man statue in Concord, Massachusetts and his depiction of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC According to tradition, French said of his Stockbridge estate: “I live here six Months in heaven on earth. I'll be spending the rest of the year, well, in New York. "