Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi
Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, (born April 2, 1834, Colmar,
Alsace, France—died Oct. 4, 1904, Paris), French sculptor of
the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.
Bartholdi trained to be an
architect in Alsace and Paris and then studied painting with
Ary Scheffer and sculpture with Antoine Etex and J.-F.
Soitoux. He toured the Middle East in 1856 with several
“Orientalist” painters, including Jean-Léon Gérôme. In 1865
he and several others conceived an idea for a monument to
the Franco-American alliance of 1778.
Beginning work in 1870,
Bartholdi designed the huge statue on his own initiative and
was able to see its construction through using funds he
raised in both France and the United States. Dedicated in
1886, the statue was titled, in full, Liberty Enlightening
the World and was given to the United States by France. The
Statue of Liberty is Bartholdi’s best-known work, but his
masterpiece among monumental projects is the Lion of Belfort
(completed 1880), which is carved out of the red sandstone
of a hill that towers over the city of Belfort in eastern
France. Once a macabre collective tomb for the National
Guard of Colmar (1872), this is the best known of
Bartholdi’s many patriotic sculptures that were inspired by
the French defeat in the Franco-German War of 1870–71.
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Statue of Liberty
Statue of Liberty, formally
Liberty Enlightening the World, colossal statue on Liberty
Island in the Upper New York Bay, U.S., commemorating the
friendship of the peoples of the United States and France.
Standing 305 feet (93 metres) high including its pedestal,
it represents a woman holding a torch in her raised right
hand and a tablet bearing the adoption date of the
Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776) in her left. The
torch, which measures 29 feet (8.8 metres) from the flame
tip to the bottom of the handle, is accessible via a 42-foot
(12.8-metre) service ladder inside the arm (this ascent was
open to the public from 1886 to 1916). An elevator carries
visitors to the observation deck in the pedestal, which may
also be reached by stairway, and a spiral staircase leads to
an observation platform in the figure’s crown. A plaque at
the pedestal’s entrance is inscribed with a sonnet, “The New
Colossus” (1883) by Emma Lazarus. It was written to help
raise money for the pedestal, and it reads:
Not like the brazen giant
of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
A French historian, Edouard
de Laboulaye, made the proposal for the statue. Funds were
contributed by the French people, and work began in France
in 1875 under sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi. The
statue was constructed of copper sheets, hammered into shape
by hand and assembled over a framework of four gigantic
steel supports, designed by Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc
and Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel. The colossus was presented to
the American minister to France Levi Morton (later vice
president) in a ceremony in Paris on July 4, 1884. In 1885
the completed statue, 151 feet 1 inch (46 metres) high and
weighing 225 tons, was disassembled and shipped to New York
City. The pedestal, designed by American architect Richard
Morris Hunt and built within the walls of Fort Wood on
Bedloe’s Island, was completed later. The statue, mounted on
its pedestal, was dedicated by President Grover Cleveland on
Oct. 28, 1886. Over the years the torch underwent several
modifications, including its conversion to electric power in
1916 and its redesign (with repoussé copper sheathed in gold
leaf) in the mid-1980s, when the statue was repaired and
restored by both American and French workers for a
centennial celebration held in July 1986. The site was added
to UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 1984.
The statue was at first
administered by the U.S. Lighthouse Board, as the
illuminated torch was considered a navigational aid. Because
Fort Wood was still an operational Army post, responsibility
for the maintenance and operation of the statue was
transferred in 1901 to the War Department. It was declared a
national monument in 1924, and in 1933 the administration of
the statue was placed under the National Park Service. Fort
Wood was deactivated in 1937, and the rest of the island was
incorporated into the monument. In 1956 Bedloe’s Island was
renamed Liberty Island, and in 1965 nearby Ellis Island,
once the country’s major immigration station, was added to
the monument’s jurisdiction, bringing its total area to
about 58 acres (about 24 hectares). Exhibits on the history
of the Statue of Liberty, including the statue’s original
1886 torch, are contained in the statue’s base.
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