Daniel Chester French (April 20, 1850 – October 7, 1931) was an American sculptor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

His works include The Minute Man, an 1874 statue in Concord, Massachusetts, and his 1920 monumental statue of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. French was born on April 20, 1850, in Exeter, New Hampshire, the son of Anne Richardson (1811–1856), daughter of William Merchant Richardson (1774–1838), chief justice of New Hampshire, and of Henry Flagg French (1813–1885), a lawyer, judge, Assistant U.S. Treasury Secretary, and author of a book that described the French drain.

In 1893, French was a founding member of the National Sculpture Society, and he was appointed a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1913.

He was a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and a co-founder of the American Academy in Rome.

[7] In 1917, French and a colleague, Henry Augustus Lukeman, designed the Pulitzer Prize gold medal presented to laureates.

[14] French died in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in 1931 at age 81, and was interred in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord.