Returning in the summer of 1876 from his two-year sojourn in Italy, French was ready to establish himself as a professional sculptor. In his absence, French's father, Henry Flagg French, had been appointed assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury. Dan joined his family in Washington, where he obtained several commissions for federal buildings. Within a decade, he was one of the leading artists in the country.

The United States Custom House, designed by Cass Gilbert, was the World Trade Center of its time. Sited at the lower end of Manhattan, the building symbolized the nation's emerging power and its reach around the globe. Like so many of the great projects of the American Renaissance, it told its story through the integration of richly symbolic sculpture and grand architecture. French was commissioned to create four large sculptural groups depicting the continents, a traditional subject going back to the Italian Renaissance.

The winner of an architectural competition among twenty leading firms, Gilbert proposed a structure reminiscent of the grandeur of a European palace, but reinvented in an American form. He approached Augustus Saint-Gaudens and French to create two sculptural groups each, but Saint-Gaudens declined, leaving French to create all four works. It took him four years to complete the project. He began with the small maquettes exhibited here, then quarter and half-size plaster models before arranging for the final figures to be carved from Tennessee marble by the Piccirilli family of stonecutters. French's Continents were intended to make a striking impression on the hundreds of people who passed within the building's shadow each day--from office workers and captains of industry to recent immigrants and sailors on leave.

Today, the Custom House building exhibits collections from the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian. How ironic that the palace erected to proclaim American dominance, which was exemplified by the vanquished Indian (seen peering from behind America), now celebrates the heritage of that same Indian! As a man of his time, French drew on the cultural biases and racial stereotypes shared by most white Americans of the era. Nevertheless, The Continents is a remarkable achievement, and it tells a story about the aspirations of a nation at the dawn of the 20th century and life in the great port of New York.