Benjamin Franklin

Jacques Jouvenal’s Benjamin Franklin commemorates the founding father as a printer, philosopher, philanthropist, and patriot. Franklin was the first U.S. Postmaster General, appointed by the Continental Congress in 1775 to oversee the fledgling U.S. Postal Service. The Postal Service predated the founding of the country and primarily carried communications between Congress and the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. In the colonies, newspaper publishers like Franklin often served as postmasters, which helped them gather and distribute news. That connection was surely not lost on Stilson Hutchins, founder of The Washington Post, who commissioned the sculpture as a gift to the citizens of Washington, D.C.

German-born sculptor Ernst Plassman provided the design for Benjamin Franklin, which was closely modeled on earlier Franklin statues he had created. However, the execution of the sculpture fell to the artist Jacques Jouvenal. Born in Pinache, Germany, Jouvenal studied sculpture in Stuttgart before emigrating to the United States in 1853. He established himself as a well-known sculptor of monuments in Washington, D.C., and took on numerous commissions, including work on the column capitals for the U.S. Capitol Building and architectural ornamentation for the State, War, and Navy Building (now the Eisenhower Executive Office Building).