New Hampshire: The Real Facts

Barrymore Laurence Scherer shares the rich allegorical meaning in Bartholdi's great sculpture.

Familiarity does have a way of breeding, if not contempt, then a kind of numb oblivion. Today, when the field of sculpture has been broadened to include a building wrapped in cloth and a shark's corpse afloat in formaldehyde, we take the Statue of Liberty for granted, too often glancing at it without actually seeing what it represents as both a monumental work of sculpture and an allegory of national and international significance.

Its sculptor, 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.

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