From
The Wall Street Journal:
[The sculptor for the Statue of Liberty], the Alsatian-born Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi (1834-1904), had been profoundly impressed by the spare majesty of Egyptian monumental sculpture he saw on a tour of the Near East and returned home determined to produce similarly grand sculpture. In 1865, Bartholdi, brainstorming with a group of French republican intellectuals, devised a plan to present the U.S. with a serious piece of fine art to honor the revolutionary heroism of the infant U.S. a century earlier, when absolute monarchs ruled most other nations. The statue also was to commemorate France's alliance with America during that time. It was, after all, the American Revolution that inspired the French one.
But Emperor Napoleon III's increasingly conservative government in France would hardly encourage such a conception. So Bartholdi channeled his ideas toward plans for a colossal lighthouse at the northern entrance of the French-financed Suez Canal, then nearing completion. The envisioned lighthouse was to take the form of a gigantic female figure in Egyptian veils and headdress holding a lantern aloft. That project came to naught in 1869, when Bartholdi's small sculptural models were rejected by the Egyptian khedive, Ismael Pasha, already up to his viceroyal ears in debt.
But in 1871, after France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and Napoleon III's exile by the new Third Republic, the idea for a monument to liberty was regarded more positively. Bartholdi refashioned his Egyptian design -- the lantern became a torch, the headdress a crown of rays. He called his proposed sculpture "Liberty Enlightening the World."
Sailing to America, he garnered support from President Ulysses Grant and other public leaders. His idea was to erect this monument in New York Harbor, America's busiest port, where it would be seen by the greatest number of people, both Americans and travelers. The plan was for it to be finished by 1876, in time for the nation's centennial celebrations. And as a symbol of the friendship between the two nations, the statue was to be funded not by the French and American governments, but by individual French and American citizens. Popular subscriptions were launched in France to pay for the gift itself and in America to underwrite the construction of the base.
The sheer size of a 150-foot-high sculpture posed unprecedented technical challenges. Traditional bronze casting was impractical -- too costly, too heavy, and too difficult to assemble in France and reassemble in America. Instead Bartholdi adopted the newer technique of fashioning the statue of plates of repoussé copper -- shaped by hammering the metal against wooden molds. The plates were also fashioned with slip joints to allow expansion and contraction in changing temperatures. To support this hollow construction, Bartholdi required a strong iron skeleton, for which he engaged a promising young engineer, Gustave Eiffel, whose eponymous tower would astound the world two decades later.
Meanwhile, Bartholdi faced money problems. The statue's $400,000 price tag was a formidable sum for the French people to raise so soon after the Franco-Prussian debacle. Nevertheless, they eventually came through, and "La Liberté éclairant le monde" was temporarily assembled in Paris to let the French see the result of their donations. But in America, public interest was sluggish. After the statue's massive torch-bearing arm was exhibited at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, it was installed in New York's Madison Square, where it stood as a curiosity for several years. Yet funds for the base only trickled in.
Finally, Joseph Pulitzer launched a fierce editorial campaign in his newspaper, the World, castigating America's wealthy for their parsimony and America's middle class for waiting to see what the rich would do. Pulitzer's hectoring worked: By 1885, the necessary $250,000 was raised for the pedestal. To lend satisfying visual support to the immense sculpture, Richard Morris Hunt (future architect of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's main façade) designed the pedestal in a massive style combining restrained Neoclassical pilasters with rusticated stone textures.
Hunt's pedestal was finished in 1886 on Bedloe's (now Liberty) Island. The rest of Bartholdi's statue and its skeleton had been shipped from France the previous year in 214 immense crates. Assembled on its place of honor, "Liberty Enlightening the World" was dedicated before a crowd of thousands by President Grover Cleveland on Oct. 28, 1886, and almost immediately was widely regarded as a symbol of the nation. At the time, the copper statue was a dull red-brown, but exposure to the elements gradually imparted the familiar green coat of verdigris.
Bartholdi reportedly used his mother as the model for the draped figure, whose Neoclassical drapery recalls the sculptural traditions of such late-18th-century artists as Antonio Canova and Antoine Houdon. His deliberate conservatism achieved an allegorical timelessness that Bartholdi deemed appropriate to the political ideal he wished to exalt.
Moreover, Bartholdi's figure conveys a series of ideas with conspicuous eloquence: Liberty's serious demeanor underscores the idea that liberty itself comes at a cost and must not be taken lightly; her robes evoke the republican ideals of ancient Greece and Rome. Her left hand and arm hold a tablet of the law -- like that of Moses descending from Mount Sinai -- inscribed "JULY IV MDCCLXXVI," the birth date of the nation (visible only from the viewing station in the crown, now closed to the public).
And no jokey foam-rubber replica of the crown can detract from the sublime balance of the real diadem, whose seven copper rays -- symbolizing the seven seas and continents -- complement in sculptural form the flood-lit gilt-copper flame of the torch (which replaced the former glass-and-copper-mesh torch during the statue's restoration of 1984-86). Finally, almost covered by the drapery, Liberty's left foot, which few viewers get to see, treads upon the broken shackles of tyranny. The receding position of her right leg makes the statue, when viewed from the south, seem to be striding onward to shed her light before her.
