French Admires Potter's Feline "Beast"

McKim’s friend Daniel Chester French, one of the most prominent American sculptors of the day, recommended that the architect engage Edward Clark Potter to produce the marble lionesses that grace the Library’s entrance. In spring 1904 French visited Potter in his Connecticut studio and wrote to reassure the anxious McKim: “You have always credited me with having a sense of what constitutes the monumental in sculpture and I think this is it!”