Congress established the Lincoln Memorial Commission in 1911 for the purpose of erecting a national monument to the sixteenth president in Washington. A site on the westward extension of the Mall was chosen, and the commission invited the architect Henry Bacon (1866-1924) to prepare a design. Early in 1913 Bacon's plan for a Doric temple was accepted. His plans included a statue of Lincoln in the interior, for which he recommended Daniel Chester French, then the country's most respected sculptor. The Lincoln Commission selected French in December 1914.

French had received his early training in sculpture from his neighbor, Abigail May Alcott, who had studied art in Paris, and in drawing from William Morris Hunt at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He spent a month in the New York studio of John Quincy Adams Ward and studied art anatomy with William Rimmer before his first major commission, the Minute Man (1875) for his hometown of Concord. Following further training in Italy under Thomas Ball, French turned to creating a variety of sculptures, including groups for public buildings in Philadelphia, Boston, and St. Louis, the 1884 seated figure of John Harvard for Harvard College, and portrait busts of Bronson Alcott and Ralph Waldo Emerson. He combined realism with allegory in all his works and proved his versatility through a wide range of subjects from the seventy-five foot sculpture of The Republic for the World's Columbian Exposition (1893) to the bronze doors of the Boston Public Library (1904). (Footnote 1)

By mid-June 1915 French had completed his design work for a seated figure of President Lincoln with a sketch model. He chose a seated pose and sought to portray "the mental and physical strength of the great President and his confidence in his ability to carry the thing [the Civil War] through to a successful finish." For the face and hands the sculptor relied heavily upon commercially obtained copies of the Volk life casts. The next step in creating the statue was to complete a working model in clay in March 1916. At this stage French changed the position of the hands and feet, the treatment of the chair was changed, and draped an American flag over the chair. As he explained to a friend, French felt that the success of the result was "probably as much due to the whole pose of the figure and particularly to the action of the hands as to the expression of the face."' Indeed, the resulting monument has become not only French's most famous sculpture but also the most celebrated image of President Lincoln.

A seven-foot model was completed by French at his home and studio Chesterwood in the summer of 1916, and the carving of the enlarged final version was turned over to the Piccirilli family of New York with French himself executing some of the final carving. By 1920 the sculpture was completed and assembled on site in the new Lincoln Memorial, which was officially dedicated on 30 May, 1922. (Footnote 3)

This cast was sold to Henry S. Howe by the sculptor in October 1927 for the "special price" of $1000, as opposed to the usual $2000. (Footnote 4) It is one of perhaps nine bronze castings of the Lincoln sculpture made during the artist's lifetime, while others were cast in the 1950s. Two of the other early examples are in the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, and the Heckscher Museum, Huntington, New York. (Footnote 5)