An icon and a model

The National Gallery of Art is joining the Lincoln exhibition bandwagon by showing the heaviest and tallest artefact of them all.

The gallery announced it will display the 450-kilogram model of the statue that sits in the Lincoln Memorial. Created by Daniel Chester French in the summer of 1916, this plaster form became the basis of the marble statue, now the iconic backdrop to speeches, concerts, film scenes and family snapshots.

For one year the gallery will show the six-foot-high model of the statue and the original wood model of the Lincoln Memorial by Henry Bacon.

The exhibition, called Designing the Lincoln Memorial: Daniel Chester French and Henry Bacon, will be in the West Building and contain illustrations about the objects, the artists and a history of the memorial over the years.

Receiving the model is a coup for the gallery because the artefact hasn't travelled since 1976 from its storage space in Stockbridge, Massachussetts, where French had a country home called Chesterwood.

The move is a delicate one. “Plaster as a medium is not permanent as is marble.

You do have to take special precautions,'' says Donna Hassler, the director of Chesterwood, now a National Historic Landmark.

“Yet the timing is so important — to be able to share this sculpture with the nation during the Lincoln Bicentennial,'' which marks the birth of the 16th president.

Chesterwood, the home and studio, is open six months each year and has 13,000 visitors annually.

The National Gallery has nearly 5 million visitors a year. The plaster model will be shipped in eight pieces.

The wood model of the memorial by Bacon is on loan from the General Services Administration.