Background
Bartholdi was born at Colmar in Alsace, France, on April 2, 1834.
Bartholdi was born at Colmar in Alsace, France, on April 2, 1834.
He received training in Colmar and Paris as an architect. He also studied painting in Paris with Ary Scheffer and sculpture with J. F. Soitoux.
In 1855 he traveled to the Middle East with the painter J. L. Gerome. The paintings that emerged from this trip were quite ordinary, and Bartholdi was soon devoting his energy to sculpture. Bartholdi's main interest was monumental sculpture, particularly large-scale pieces glorifying heroic ideas, personalities, and events. Here his architectural training served him well, enabling him to handle successfully some extremely difficult problems of structure and materials. The Statue of Liberty, formally known as Liberty Enlightening the World, not only was executed by Bartholdi, but was produced almost entirely on his initiative and with funds raised by his energies in France and the United States. Intended as a monument to the Franco-American alliance of 1778, the massive statue was hammered on a wooden mold out of 300 separate giant sheets of copper. The statue was presented in Paris in 1884, dismantled, shipped to the United States, and dedicated on Oct. 28, 1886. Another Bartholdi monument, possibly his greatest tour de force, is the Lion of Belfort, completed in 1888. Located in Belfort, France, the Lion is carved out of the red sandstone of a hill towering over the city. The huge statue honors the defense of Belfort in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War. Other Bartholdi sculptures are a double statue of the Marquis de Lafayette and George Washington (1873) in the Place des Etats-Unis in Paris and Lafayette Arriving in America (1875) at Union Square in New York City.
In 1875, he joined the Freemasons Lodge Alsace-Lorraine in Paris. In 1876, Bartholdi was one of the French commissioners in 1876 to the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition.
In 1876, he married Jeanne-Emile Baheux in Providence, Rhode Island.