/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/ea/47/ea47e7be-98e3-4515-972b-fabff9e3746b/saam-xx76_7.jpg)
This Remarkable Statue of Liberty Model Made by the Sculptor of the Original Has a New Summer Home at the Smithsonian Castle
Artist Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s small maquette represents the big ideals of the iconic national monument in New York Harbor
:focal(2160x2880:2161x2881)/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/ea/47/ea47e7be-98e3-4515-972b-fabff9e3746b/saam-xx76_7.jpg)
As curator of sculpture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Karen Lemmey has watched the faces of everyone from kindergarteners to retirees light up when they see a nearly four-foot tall Lady Liberty, holding her tablet and raising her torch high.
“I think you can ask a kid almost anywhere in the U.S., ‘What is this?’ And they’ll be like, ‘I’ve seen that before. Is that the Statue of Liberty?’” Lemmey says. “It remains familiar, and it asserts itself. And that’s really hard for a monument from more than 100 years ago.”
Lemmey invites museumgoers to view the Liberty model as not only a monument, but a work of art that had public support and became a national icon.
In the 1870s, French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi began designing the famous statue that now stands on an island in New York Harbor. The French people gifted the sculpture to the U.S. as an ode to freedom and independence, and a celebration of the alliance the two nations have had since the Revolutionary War. After being built and shipped from France, the statue was reassembled and completed in 1886, standing on Bedloe’s Island, which would be renamed Liberty Island.
Bartholdi crafted a small-scale model of Liberty out of bronze, terra cotta and tin, circa 1884. It was on view in the U.S. Capitol from 1884 to 1887 and is now part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection and usually displayed there.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/d7/eb/d7eb6cb6-262d-45f7-a50d-9d682b0d4845/xx76_1.jpg)
But the artifact has a new home for the next two months: It’s now on display in the “American Aspirations” exhibition, open through July 26 at the Smithsonian Castle. The exhibition is part of the Smithsonian’s institution-wide commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The model Liberty, which holds a tablet inscribed with the date July 4, 1776, is displayed alongside more than 30 other significant objects from Smithsonian collections, including the desk on which Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, Amelia Earhart’s flight suit and Martin Luther King Jr.’s copy of the original speech he prepared for the March on Washington.
Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III co-developed the showcase with curator Abeer Saha and curator emeritus Harry Rubenstein of the National Museum of American History.
“Objects have such power,” Bunch tells Smithsonian magazine. “What I wanted was to find the tension between objects that would obviously tell you historical significance and objects that we help you find that significance.”
Bunch adds, “America is as much an ideal as it is a place, and that’s really important.” The Bartholdi model speaks to the question: “What does liberty mean for America?”
The making of an icon
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/66/6d/666d16f2-ce41-4fb9-a5c2-74de3d46a449/liberty_-_6z2a5680-edit-1-_photo_credit_-_paul_seibert.jpg)
Édouard de Laboulaye, a French abolitionist and supporter of President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, first suggested the creation of a monument for the U.S. that would become the Statue of Liberty in 1865. The National Park Service notes: “The recent Union victory in the Civil War, which reaffirmed the United States’ ideals of freedom and democracy, served as a platform for de Laboulaye to argue that honoring the United States would strengthen the cause for democracy in France. As the president of the French Anti-Slavery Society, de Laboulaye believed that the passage of the 13th Amendment (abolishing slavery in the U.S., 1865) was a milestone and it proved that justice and liberty for all was possible.”
A decade later, de Laboulaye announced the project and formed a fundraising group to garner monetary support for the sculpture from the French people. Bartholdi would sculpt the figure while Gustave Eiffel, who later designed the Eiffel Tower, would engineer the structure to withstand wind gusts and salty air.
While the statue was paid for by France, Americans were expected to foot the bill for its pedestal, which would anchor and display the sculpture in New York Harbor.
Bartholdi drummed up interest for the work for years and patented parts of the design while doing so. “It’s interesting how artists think about their work in the world, especially an international artist, and the way that they’re trying to protect their idea while at the same time publicizing it,” Lemmey says. “That’s the unwavering belief that Bartholdi had to maintain in order to literally body this forth, even when it probably looked pretty bleak for one reason or another.”
The creators sent a portion of the statue, the right arm and torch, to Philadelphia in 1876 for the United States centennial display. “This was a powerful way of saying, ‘This is happening. Can we build the whole thing?’” Lemmey says.
The arm and torch were then exhibited in Madison Square Park in New York City from 1877 to 1882.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/96/a7/96a7ed44-8946-40be-afd8-bd7def81a0fd/liberty_-_img_2005-edit_-_photo_credit_-_paul_seibert.jpg)
After the American Committee for the Statue of Liberty fell short of raising the funds for the pedestal in 1884, newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer made a national plea to the public to donate money. “It is not a gift from the millionaires of France to the millionaires of America, but a gift of the whole people of France to the whole people of America,” he wrote in a March 1885 column. A couple months later, the parts of the statue arrived in the U.S. encased in 214 boxes to be reconstructed. By August 1885, Americans donated over $100,000 for the pedestal, with most contributions being about $1 or less. Pulitzer is considered a crowdfunding trailblazer for his role in the fundraising.
The statue, 305 feet tall from the ground to the tip of its torch, “was an engineering marvel when it was unveiled in 1886,” says Andrew Eschelbacher, curator for the Amon Carter Museum of American Art’s “The Statue of Liberty from Bartholdi to Warhol” exhibition, which opens later this year in Fort Worth, Texas.
“From the beginning, as it started to make its way into public stories and newspapers, people started to understand that this was a gift from the nation of France to the United States, and that this wasn’t just a monument in New York City,” Lemmey says.
The 1883 poem “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus was another fundraising effort for the pedestal. A bronze plaque of the poem was attached to the statue’s base in 1903, about 16 years after her death. Some of the poem’s lines have become synonymous with the statue:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
The fact that the French people raised funds for the statue and the American people for the pedestal, rather than the money coming from the countries’ governments, is an important part of what the statue symbolizes, says Carlos Lamadrid, chief advancement officer for the Statue of Liberty & Ellis Island Foundation. “It truly is a symbol for the people and of the people, and paid for by the people, and I think that history and what it represents is truly unique and very American.”
Quick facts: Lady Liberty personified
- The monument is frequently anthropomorphized in media as a figure representing the people of the United States.
- Bill Sanders of North Carolina’s Greensboro Daily News sketched a cartoon of the statue slumped over in grief after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
The symbolism is in the eye of the beholder
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/9a/8c/9a8cc0cf-f875-4f7c-92d7-29e8a9f8f122/sol_face__torch_summer_2025_elena_woodruff.jpg)
When the statue was unveiled, some argued that it insincerely represented American freedom.
Suffragists called the statue “a gigantic lie, a travesty and a mockery,” questioning the choice of its female figure when American women had few liberties and couldn’t vote. Many formerly enslaved Black Americans saw the statue as an ironic image of a country that stood for justice for all but still excluded many.
“When Americans celebrated the inauguration of the Statue of Liberty in 1886, they celebrated a racialized vision of liberty,” said the late historian Tyler Stovall in a 2018 address to the American Historical Association. Stovall served as president of the American Historical Association in 2017. He continued: “Right from the beginning of its history in America, therefore, the Statue of Liberty was a powerful representation of white freedom.”
Designs showed that Bartholdi originally planned to have the statue holding a broken chain and shackle in her hand, but he replaced them with the tablet and made the shackles less prominent by adding them beneath Lady Liberty’s feet. The “American Aspirations” exhibition text notes that the statue was intended to celebrate American independence alongside the abolition of slavery.
Over time, that sentiment “transformed into a symbol of openness in immigration,” says Bunch.
The statue became deeply associated with Ellis Island, Liberty Island’s neighbor. Millions of immigrants passed the Statue of Liberty as they arrived in the United States via Ellis Island during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
“People who immigrated to this country came here for numerous reasons. They came here for a better life, almost always. They came here to escape persecution,” Lamadrid says. “As they were being processed at Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty represented what they had actually ultimately come here for.”
Immigrants also contributed to the statue’s completion. According to the National Park Service, “Once the pedestal was completed in 1886, the statue was reassembled with surprising speed by a fearless construction crew—many of whom were new immigrants.”
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/9c/1e/9c1e6e13-b434-4b2b-b9ae-b79a77d705bd/upper_ny_bay_-_courtesy_of_library_of_congress.jpg)
Nearly six million people visit the statue each year, Lamadrid says. The Statue of Liberty Museum opened on Liberty Island in 2019 to educate visitors about the sculpture.
“If art is defined as something that’s supposed to move you emotionally, the statute really moves people emotionally on two levels. Number one, it moves people emotionally on the idea of, wow, look at this amazing work of art that people made … with hammers and chisels,” he says. “It also works on a symbolic level of freedom that is truly unique on a global scale here in the United States.”
But the freedoms were not given to all immigrants equally. The Feature Profile Test, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Alien Contract Labor Law and the Immigration Act of 1924 were among the ways immigration to the U.S. was limited, according to the Statue of Liberty & Ellis Island Foundation.
President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the 1965 Immigration Act, which “erased America’s longstanding policy of limiting immigration based on national origin,” in a ceremony held at the base of the Statue of Liberty.
What the statue represents “from an aspirational point of view and what it represents from the point of view of critique has been an ongoing conversation since the 1880s,” Eschelbacher says. “I think the role of artists in shaping that conversation and advancing that conversation has been a very interesting historical path to follow. We see the role of visual artists in shaping and reflecting that discourse about how the Statue of Liberty animates our thinking around ideas of liberty, around ideas of America.”
As for the Bartholdi model now on display at the Smithsonian Castle, Bunch says, “It really is an object that has many layers.” While hundreds of feet smaller than its New York counterpart, it’s a way people can “see the Statue of Liberty to really understand the totality of it.”