The Spirit of Life

This is a bronze statue blending Greek mythology and local geography into a tribute to a man named Spencer Trask. He was a wealthy man who did much to benefit the town of Saratoga Springs in New York. The statue is of the Greek goddess of health, Hygeia. She is standing tall, draped with swirling cloth, fitted with wings and standing on a rock, out of which a spring is flowing (Saratoga Springs). Her arms are raised, the left hand holds the bowl of life-giving water and the right a twig from a pine that grows in Saratoga Springs.

Daniel Chester French
American (1850-1931)
The Spirit of Life, modeled 1914
Bronze
Gift of The Imperial Recreation Club for Men of the Service
American Art
Location: Exhibit, Gallery 276
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Dimensions: H: 49 1/2 in, W: 33 1/2 in, D: 27 in
Object ID: 26.4.1

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Daniel Chester French
Exeter, N.H. 1850-1931 Stockbridge, Mass.
The Spirit of Life, modeled 1914
Bronze, 49 1/4 × 33 1/2 × 27 in. (125.1 × 85.1 × 68.6 cm)
Inscribed on the base: DC FRENCH
\tab\tab May 1914
\tab\tab ROMAN BRONZE WORKS N.Y.
Gift of the Imperial Recreation Club for Men of the Service, 26.4.1

Reference: Joseph T. Knox, Antonin Mercié in Context: The French Academic Tradition in American Public Sculpture, exhib. cat., Marsh Gallery, University of Richmond, Va., 1990, pp. 15, 17, 24.

In 1913, the poet Katrina Trask commissioned sculptor Daniel Chester French and architect Henry Bacon to create a memorial to her late husband, philanthropist Spencer Trask. The couple owned a large estate near Saratoga Springs, New York, and Trask had been an advocate for the area's famous healing waters. In the finished memorial (1915, Congress Park, Saratoga Springs), an idealized female figure rests atop a fountain within a semicircular niche overlooking a pool of water. The restrained classical design resembles Bacon and French's more famous collaboration, the Lincoln Memorial (1914-22, Washington, D.C.).
The figure represents Hygieia, the giver of health, who usually appeared in Greek and Roman art accompanying her father, Asklepios, the god of medicine. She is often shown offering nourishment to a serpent entwined on the staff Asklepios carries. In French's conception, Hygieia holds a shallow bowl aloft and in the other hand clasps a pine bough, a reference to the towering pines on the grounds of the Trasks' estate. The goddess is poised lightly on a rock, and a stream of water pours from its cleft.
French created several small maquettes for the figure in 1913, and the next year he completed a working model just over four feet tall. (The final version would be slightly more than life- size.) From 1915 to 1926, eight bronze casts were made of the working model. One of these was purchased in 1926 by the Norfolk Society of the Arts with funds from the dissolution of a World War I servicemen's club. Given in honor of the servicemen, the sculpture was one of the first objects to enter the collection of the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences, the predecessor to the Chrysler Museum of Art.
The Spirit of Lifecame relatively late in French's long career. As a young man, he was taught drawing by William Morris Hunt (see object 71.661), anatomy by Boston sculptor William Rimmer, and sculpture by John Quincy Adams Ward in New York; he later traveled to Florence to study antique sculpture with Thomas Ball. With his reputation already well established by The Minute Man(1873-74, Town of Concord), he was thirty-six years old when he moved to Paris in 1886 to enter the studio of Antonin Mercié. Art historian H.W. Janson attributed the enlivened surfaces and varied textures of his later works, so evident in The Spirit of Life, to his decision to study modern French sculptural techniques with Mercié.
MNH