Since 2001, a marble bust of a young girl had been tucked away in storage at Chesterwood, the former Stockbridge, Massachusetts, home and studio of sculptor Daniel Chester French. (Chesterwood is now a National Trust Historic Site.) Donated by a descendant of French’s neighbor Nora Iasigi Bullitt, the work was marked as possibly having been created by Bullitt, who took sculpting lessons from French in his studio. The details about the bust intrigued the site’s curatorial researcher and collections coordinator, Dana Pilson, but she didn’t lay eyes on it until a recent inventory of the sculpture collection. “We pulled it out, and I knew just upon looking at it that it had to be by French, and it had to be a portrait of his daughter at a young age,” Pilson says.

Pilson is familiar with the face of French’s daughter, Margaret French Cresson. Though most famous for his 1922 Abraham Lincoln statue at the Lincoln Memorial, French often asked Margaret to pose for other works. Renditions of her exist as angels in a memorial in Milwaukee made in 1896 and a font in a Baltimore church that French created around 1902.

Chesterwood also owns some precursor studies of Margaret, such as plaster models that led to the final sculptures. This is the only marble likeness of her, however, that Chesterwood has in its collection. “The marble is on a different plane,” Pilson says. “He created an independent portrait of her as a record of his daughter at this age.” Chesterwood found documents that support Pilson’s initial impression of the bust, and after being correctly re-labeled, it is now nestled among other works in the site’s permanent collection gallery.