When Nebraska school children were asked to help raise money to construct a monument to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, the pennies they collected did not have the Lincoln Memorial on the reverse. In fact, it was ten years after sculptor Daniel Chester French and architect Henry Bacon’s Lincoln Monument in Nebraska was dedicated that the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall in Washington D.C. was dedicated. When Nebraskans chose to honor President Lincoln with a statue on the capitol’s grounds, the Abraham Lincoln Centennial Memorial Association of Nebraska commissioned a major figure in American sculpture, Daniel Chester French. French was pleased to receive the opportunity to portray the great president on the grounds of the Nebraska State Capitol. The significance of the subject, Lincoln, and the location, Lincoln, were an incentive for him to create something monumental. French, with his standing Lincoln and the later seated Lincoln, succeeded in creating iconic images. Like many artists, he used Matthew Brady’s photographs and the Leonard Volk life mask of 1860 to create a likeness. Seeking just the right stance or posture for the standing figure he reviewed photographs of Lincoln collected by Frederick H. Meserve. The success of Nebraska’s Lincoln Monument was carried over and enlarged upon in Bacon and French’s work in Washington D.C.
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Please join the Office of the Capitol Commission is celebrating the centennial of Nebraska’s Lincoln Monument. The free public program, funded in part by the Nebraska Humanities Council and the Nebraska Cultural Endowment, will begin in the Warner Chamber of the Nebraska State Capitol at 2:00 p.m. on September 2, 2012. Mayda Jensen of Jensen Conservation in Omaha will provide more information Abraham Lincoln sculptor Daniel Chester French. The program will conclude at 2:30 with proclamations at the monument on the west side of the Capitol.[RoyalSlider Error] No post attachments found.
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