{"product_id":"abraham-lincoln-monument-in-grant-park-west-view","title":"Abraham Lincoln Monument in Grant Park West View","description":"\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eADDRESS: Grant Park, Chicago, IL\u003cbr\u003eSCULPTOR: Augustus Saint-Gaudens\u003cbr\u003eYEAR COMPLETED: 1906\u003cbr\u003eYEAR INSTALLED: 1926\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWalk past it enough times, and you stop seeing it. Grant Park, south of the Art Institute. Bronze man in a stone semicircle. A landmark so familiar it becomes invisible.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThat is the problem with monuments. They become furniture.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis one deserves better.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 1889, a Chicago businessman named John Crerar died and left behind an unusual will. He wanted two things built with his money: a scientific library and a colossal statue of Abraham Lincoln. He set aside $100,000 for the project, roughly $2.75 million today. Crerar never saw either built. That is often how these things go in Chicago. The vision outlasts the man.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHis trustees hired Augustus Saint-Gaudens in 1897. The choice was obvious. Saint-Gaudens had already created the Standing Lincoln in Lincoln Park a decade earlier, a bronze president rising to address the nation. That statue made his reputation. But Saint-Gaudens wanted to make something harder and truer. Not the public man. The private one.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHe worked on the seated version for twelve years.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThen, in 1904, his studio burned to the ground. The completed model went with it. Years of work, gone in a night. Saint-Gaudens was already ill. He started again anyway. He finished the second version in 1906, sent it to the foundry in New York for casting, and died in 1907. He never saw it installed. He never saw it in the city it was made for.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe bronze sat in a crate in the basement of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for six years.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere is the civic irony that only Chicago could produce. The statue had been intended for Grant Park, but a mail-order magnate named Aaron Montgomery Ward kept suing the city to keep the lakefront open and unobstructed. He won. His lawsuits cleared out the Field Museum, the proposed Crerar Library, and everything else anyone wanted to build in the park. The Seated Lincoln had nowhere to go. So it traveled. A basement in New York. A storage building on the South Side. A centerpiece at the 1915 San Francisco Exposition. Nearly two decades of wandering before the city finally found a home.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe monument was unveiled on May 31, 1926. Nearly thirty years after it was commissioned. Nearly twenty years after the sculptor died.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eStand in front of it now, and you understand why Saint-Gaudens thought this version was the truer one.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Lincoln in Lincoln Park is standing. He is about to speak. His chin is lifted. His coat falls open. He is the orator, the statesman, the man who commands a room. You know what he is about to say. Or you think you do.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis Lincoln is seated. His hands rest on the arms of a great ceremonial chair. His gaze is downward and inward. He is not addressing anyone. He is thinking. And the thing he is thinking about is visible in every line of his body: the weight of holding a nation together while it tears itself apart.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSaint-Gaudens studied the Italian sculptor Vincenzo Vela, who made a famous bronze of Napoleon in his final days, not triumphant but exhausted, stripped of everything except the fact of being a man. Saint-Gaudens wanted the same truth for Lincoln. Not the symbol. The person.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe chair is deliberately oversized. Lincoln looks almost small inside it. That was the point. The office of the presidency is larger than any man who holds it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBehind the statue rises a curved stone bench, an exedra, designed by architect Stanford White. It stretches 150 feet across. It wraps the statue in a quiet arc, cutting off the noise of the city, turning the space into something closer to a sanctuary than a sidewalk. The stone was built on land reclaimed from Lake Michigan. Chicago extended itself into the water specifically to give Lincoln somewhere to sit.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe face was considered so accurate a likeness that it became the model for the 1909 U.S. postage stamp issued for the centennial of Lincoln's birth. A sculptor who died before seeing his work installed ended up shaping how an entire nation pictured its sixteenth president.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThere is one more thing worth knowing, and it falls into the category of facts that Chicago keeps as a private joke.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe statue of Lincoln is in Grant Park. The statue of Ulysses S. Grant is in Lincoln Park. Nobody planned the swap. It simply happened, the way Chicago happens, sideways and without apology. The two men who together saved the Union ended up commemorated in each other's front yards. Both were bound to Illinois. Lincoln lived in Springfield. Grant made his home in Galena. The coincidence is either meaningless or it means everything, depending on your mood.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 2021, the city reviewed 41 public monuments for possible removal. The committee examined the Seated Lincoln alongside cavalry generals and equestrian figures whose legacies had grown complicated. They voted unanimously to keep it. They called it a necessary space to contemplate the complex circumstances and ironies of Lincoln's life. One century after its dedication, it was still earning its place.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGo and find it in Grant Park. Not on your way to somewhere else. For this alone.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSit on the exedra steps. Look at the face. Look at the hands resting on those armrests with the particular stillness of a man who cannot afford to move. Think about what he was deciding in that posture. Think about the fire that destroyed the first version of this statue and the sculptor who started over anyway. Think about twenty years of wandering before a piece of bronze found its home on land that didn't exist when Lincoln was alive.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThat is Chicago: the vision outlasts the man, the city extends itself into the water, and eventually the work finds its place.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNow look at it like you have never seen it before. Because you haven't.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Igor Menaker Fine Art","offers":[{"title":"MATTED \/ 08x10","offer_id":51077589696790,"sku":null,"price":40.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"MATTED \/ 16x20","offer_id":51077589729558,"sku":null,"price":125.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"FRAMED \/ 16x16","offer_id":51077589762326,"sku":null,"price":200.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"FRAMED \/ 24x24","offer_id":51077589795094,"sku":null,"price":450.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"FRAMED \/ 32x32","offer_id":51077589827862,"sku":null,"price":800.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"FRAMED \/ 44x44","offer_id":51077589860630,"sku":null,"price":2200.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"PHOTO \/ 24x24","offer_id":51077589893398,"sku":null,"price":325.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"PHOTO \/ 32x32","offer_id":51077589926166,"sku":null,"price":525.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"PHOTO \/ 44x44","offer_id":51077589958934,"sku":null,"price":1450.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"SPLIT \/ 60x60","offer_id":51077589991702,"sku":null,"price":3950.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"SPLIT \/ 90x90","offer_id":51077590024470,"sku":null,"price":8750.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"SPLIT \/ 120x120","offer_id":51077590057238,"sku":null,"price":14950.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1306\/7343\/files\/AbrahamLincolnMonumentinGrantParkWestViewcopy.jpg?v=1772650488","url":"https:\/\/www.menaker.com\/products\/abraham-lincoln-monument-in-grant-park-west-view","provider":"Igor Menaker Fine Art","version":"1.0","type":"link"}