I’ve been waiting for a couple of phone calls to be returned, but at
this point I wanted to get the information I had located posted for
you so that you can pursue further leads.
A bronze reproduction is currently on display in the State House
Rotunda in Trenton, NJ
(http://www.state.nj.us/treasury/omb/publications/03bib/pdf/bib.pdf).
It is on loan from the New Jersey State Museum Collection. Ms.
Margaret O’Reilly from the museum’s Fine Art department was kind
enough to return my call. She says their particular reproduction was
done once Daniel Chester French had decided which pose to use for the
full-size sculpture inside the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC
(http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/today/apr20.html). Unfortunately, she
told me that she is not permitted to release the valuation of their
statue.
However, she did say that (as I suspected) French had tried the
sculpture in a number of varied positions before settling on the final
version, and that in fact, there is a book about the different
versions he made (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0822520672/002-2735637-4763255).
Ms O’Reilly also told me that French’s former summer home in
Massachusetts, Chesterwood, is now a museum and memorial dedicated to
him, and that they have several of the reproductions in question
(http://www.chesterwood.org/history.html). The Chesterwood museum can
be reached at (413)298-3579.
Another copy is in Lincoln's tomb in Springfield, IL. I don’t know
whether they would release its valuation, but you might give them a
try: "Call (217) 782-2717 or write: Site Manager, Lincoln Tomb State
Historic Site, Oak Ridge Cemetery, Springfield, IL 62702".
(http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/art/lobby.htm)
Yet another copy is in the lobby of the Lincoln Building at 60 E. 42nd
Street in New York City:
(http://www.60east42st.com/About/History.html). My message to the
building’s management has not yet been returned; however, you might
want to try contacting them yourself. The phone number is
(212)697-0697; there are also several e-mail addresses on their
contact page (http://www.60east42st.com/Contact/index.html).
Finally, I found that a 190.5 cm (approx 75”) bronze reproduction was
sold at auction on Nov 28, 2001
(http://web.artprice.com/EN/PS/ArtItems.aspx?refGenre=C). However, you
will have to pay to find out the selling price: Artprice.com will sell
you 20 price lookups for $20, so this may be an inexpensive
preliminary way to find a valuation for your piece, if it has the same
dimensions
(http://client.serveur.com/EN/Forms/UnitSelect.aspx).
Interesting factoid: there is considerable academic debate whether
"Chester French purposely sculpted A. Lincoln's statue so that his
hands formed an "A" and "L"." (i.e., the position of the hands forms
the sign language signal for each character:
http://where.com/scott.net/asl/abc.html ). Since he had produced for
the Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet School for the Deaf a sculpture of the
founder which shows Gallaudet making the hand sign for “A”, it has
been speculated that French intended the position of Lincoln’s hands
in the sculpture to represent “A” and “L”
(http://library.gallaudet.edu/dr/faq-lincoln-memorial.html). A
close-up of the sculpture showing the purported sign language hands is
at
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MUSEUM/Armory/galleryB/french.html .
I really hope that you will find this to be of some assistance to you.
Good Luck! |
