Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi

Lore & Background

Bartholdi was born in Colmar, France, on 2 August 1834. He was born to a family of Alsatian Protestant heritage, with his family name adopted from Barthold. His parents were Jean Charles Bartholdi (1791–1836) and Augusta Charlotte Bartholdi (née Beysser; 1801–1891). Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi was the youngest of their four children, and one of only two to survive infancy, along with the oldest brother, Jean-Charles, who became a lawyer and editor. Bartholdi's father, a property owner and counselor to the prefecture, died when Bartholdi was two years old. Afterwards, Bartholdi moved with his mother and his older brother Jean-Charles to Paris, where another branch of their family resided. With the family often returning to spend long periods of time in Colmar, the family maintained ownership and visited their house in Alsace, which later became the Bartholdi Museum in 1922. While in Colmar, Bartholdi took drawing lessons from Martin Rossbach. In Paris, he studied sculpture with Antoine Étex. He also studied architecture under Henri Labrouste and Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc. Bartholdi attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris and received a baccalauréat in 1852. He then went on to study architecture at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts as well as painting under Ary Scheffer in his studio in the Rue Chaptal, now the Musée de la Vie Romantique. Later, Bartholdi turned his attention to sculpture, which afterward exclusively occupied him and his life. In 1853, Bartholdi submitted a Good Samaritan-themed sculptural group to the Paris Salon of 1853. The statue was later recreated in bronze. Within two years of his Salon debut, Bartholdi was commissioned by his hometown of Colmar to sculpt a bronze memorial of Jean Rapp, a Napoleonic General. In 1855 and 1856, Bartholdi traveled in Yemen and Egypt with travel companions such as Jean-Léon Gérôme and other orientalist painters. The trip sparked Bartholdi's interest in colossal sculpture. In 1869, Bartholdi returned to Egypt to propose a new lighthouse to be built at the entrance of the Suez Canal, which was newly completed. The proposed lighthouse, which was to be called Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia and shaped as a massive, draped figure holding a torch, was turned down by Isma'il Pasha, the Khedive of Egypt, and Ferdinand de Lesseps, the president of the Suez Canal Company, citing the high cost. The

Reader's Guide

The work for which Bartholdi is most famous is Liberty Enlightening the World, better known as the Statue of Liberty. Soon after the establishment of the French Third Republic, the project of building some suitable memorial to show the fraternal feeling existing between the republics of the United States and France was suggested, and in 1874 the Union Franco-Américaine (Franco-American Union) was established by Edouard de Laboulaye. Bartholdi's hometown in Alsace had just passed into German control in the Franco-Prussian War. These troubles in his ancestral home of Alsace are purported to have further influenced Bartholdi's own great interest in independence, liberty, and self-determination. Bartholdi subsequently joined the Union Franco-Américaine, among whose members were Laboulaye, Paul de Rémusat, William Waddington, Henri Martin, Ferdinand Marie de Lesseps, Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau, Oscar Gilbert Lafayette, François Charles Lorraine, and Louis François Lorraine. Bartholdi broached the idea of a massive statue, and once its design was approved, the Union Franco-Américaine raised more than 1 million francs throughout France for its building. In 1879, Bartholdi was awarded design patent U.S. patent D11,023 for the Statue of Liberty. On 4 July 1880, the statue was formally delivered to the American minister in Paris, the event being celebrated by a great banquet. In October 1886, the structure was officially presented as the joint gift of the French and American people, and installed on Bedloe's Island in New York Harbor. Originally, it arrived with chains presented in the left hand leading down to the feet, which was to represent the liberty of the United States from slavery. It was also originally the colour of copper to represent as such. The United States made a deal with Bartholdi that if the chains were to be removed from the upper part of the body, they could stay at the feet, but they, too, must be hidden. It was also rumoured in France that the face of the Statue of Liberty was modeled after Bartholdi's mother. The statue is 46 metres (151 ft), and the top of the torch is at an elevation of 93 metres (305 ft) from mean low-water mark. It was the largest work of its kind that had been completed up to that time. Bartholdi's hometown Colmar (modern political administrative region of Grand Est) has a number of statues and m

Did You Know?

• Bartholdi's rare paintings are usually signed under the pseudonym 'Amilcar Hasenfratz.'
• The Statue of Liberty originally arrived with chains presented in the left hand leading down to the feet, representing liberty from slavery; the chains were later removed from the upper body and hidden at the feet.
• Bartholdi's father died when he was two years old, and he later moved with his mother and brother to Paris.
• Bartholdi served in the Franco-Prussian War as a squadron leader of the National Guard and as a liaison officer to Italian General Giuseppe Garibaldi.