Andrew O'Connor, jr. (1874-1941), was the son of the artist who who had sculpted the 15th Mass. "Wounded Lion" at Antietam (
http://civilwartalk.com/threads/the-wounded-lion-of-the-15th-massachusetts.129034/#post-1428614). Born in Worcester, Mass., the younger O'Connor had studied in London with John Singer Sargent, in America with Daniel Chester French, and Paris with Auguste Rodin. During his lifetime, O'Connor did several smaller busts of Abraham Lincoln, but also three outstanding, but very different monumental sculptures of our 16th President.
The first of these was the full length bronze figure of Abraham Lincoln that stands in front of the State Capitol in Springfield, Ill.
This is "The Lincoln of the Farewell Address," pictured as he was about to leave Springfield to take up the burdens of
the Presidency. Invited to submit a design by the Illinois Art Commission, O'Connor took three years to complete the sculpture. Robert Todd Lincoln loaned him his father's life mask and a cast of Lincoln's hands made during his lifetime to incorporate into the portrait. O'Connor's sculpture was chosen over several competitors. It was unveiled in the Summer of 1918, during the Illinois Statehood Centennial.
A decade later, Andrew O'Connor created another extraordinary Lincoln portrait, a larger than life bust in limestone. A lean, angular, rough-hewn Lincoln, it stands in the Royal Exchange Building in London, and was a 1928 gift from the American Government.
In 1927, O'Connor was commissioned my the city of Providence, Rhode Island to do yet another Lincoln bronze, to be funded by contributions from the public. It was a truly monumental, seated Lincoln, older, tired, care-worn by the heroic struggle to save the Union. But, by the time the work was finished, the Depression had struck, and the city could not come up with the $20,000 cost. The bronze remained in the yard of the foundry where it was cast until 1956, fifteen years after Andrew O'Connor's death, when it was bought by Lincoln Park in Bladensburg, Md., a suburb of Washington D.C. And there it sits today, at the entrance to Fort Lincoln Cemetery.