![]() ![]() The colossus was assembled in Paris and taken apart to prepare for shipment to America. As money came in, Bartholdi oversaw the construction of the statue at the warehouse of Gaget, Gauthier & Co. Bartholdi involved himself and his work in the fundraising efforts, displaying the torch and arm in Philadelphia and New York, and the head and shoulders in Paris, all while selling miniatures and charging admission in some cases. ![]() France would raise funds for the statue while Americans raised money for the pedestal. ![]() Over the next few years Bartholdi and Laboulaye set up committees in the two countries. However, he received little more than words of encouragement regarding the construction of a colossal statue. In a little under three months, Bartholdi found a preferred location for the statue on Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor, a new commission for a frieze at the Brattle Square Church in Boston, and the possibility of displaying some works at the upcoming Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. This design was ultimately rejected by the khedive.Īrmed with letters of introduction from Laboulaye, Bartholdi secured meetings with some of America’s most influential people, with mixed results. Bartholdi presented a figurine for a colossal lighthouse depicting an Egyptian fellah, a female serf, entitled Egypt (or Progress) Carrying the Light to Asia. Their kindly and impassible glance seems to ignore the present and to be fixed upon an unlimited future.”Īs an emerging artist, Bartholdi actively searched for commissions as well as inspiration, and he secured a meeting with Khedive Isma'il Pasha of Egypt, the ruler overseeing and funding the French construction of the Suez Canal. They encountered desert landscapes where ancient cities lay in ruins but colossal statues remained, inspiring Bartholdi to write “These granite beings, in their imperturbable majesty, seem to be still listening to the most remote antiquity. When Auguste was nine, his mother Charlotte moved with her children to Paris to enroll them at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and allow them to study under some of France’s most accomplished artists, braving the city’s civil unrest for her sons’ education.Īfter completing his first commissioned work at age twenty, a large bronze statue of Napoleonic General Jean Rapp, Bartholdi travelled with a group of French cultural ambassadors to photograph works of antiquity in Egypt. The sculptor behind the Statue of Liberty, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, was born in 1834 in Colmar, France in the Alsace region on the border of Germany. National Park Service, Statue of Liberty NM ![]()
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