The Concord Minute Man of 1775

At the young age of 25, in 1875 Daniel Chester French completed the monumental Minute Man (Minuteman National Historic Part, Concord, Massachusetts) to celebrate the centennial of the Battle of Concord at North Bridge. The statue was received with such acclaim that, in 1889, a group of Concord residents requested French produce a reduction for the Navy gunboat Concord, which was subsequently completed and installed in 1891. Michael Richman writes that this version, now in the Navy Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., "is not a reduction but a reworking of the statue, and the differences between them show that in the intervening fifteen years French had become a more accomplished sculptor...The spirited pose of the 1874 statue is improved in the small bronze. More proficient in his understanding of anatomy, the sculptor was able to give the figure a new feeling of coordinated movement." (Daniel Chester French: An American Sculptor, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1976, p. 46)

Thayer Tolles writes, "Around 1913, French authorized the casting of 32-inch reductions, first at Jno. Williams foundry and, after 1917, also at Gorham Co. Gorham also made a 14-inch reduction in an edition of ten, beginning in 1917 through 1939." (Selections from the American Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts and the George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum, Springfield, Massachusetts, 1999, p. 224) Other Jno. Williams casts are in the collections of Ball State University Museum of Art, Muncie, Indiana, and the National Board for Promotion of Rifle Practice, Department of the Army, Washington, D.C.