Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty (15 page)

He first expressed a favorable impression of the bearded, white-haired, seventy-one-year-old Young, probably because Young’s followers hoped to produce a bust or portrait of the eminent religious leader and Bartholdi would not fault a potential client: “He is an extraordinary personage, very intelligent and full of energy; he is also very shrewd and knows how to take advantage of human stupidity. . . . It seems the President has sixteen wives and forty-nine children.”

When Bartholdi returned the next day to sketch Young, the president snubbed him by saying that he was busy and that the artist needed to come again the following day, or the day after. Bartholdi didn’t return, but made a drawing of Young for his own sketchbook. “Decidedly, he makes too much fuss—they can go to blazes.”

Out in California, Bartholdi first arrived in Sacramento, then Oakland, which he understood to be an island in San Francisco Bay. Again the American people appealed to Bartholdi less than the landscape. He found the Chinese quarter and Waverly Place “astonishingly immoral. America should be seen in all its phases—it has some ugly ones.”

He wrote to Charlotte, “Yesterday I went with a number of Frenchmen to a Chinese theatre, a real Chinese theatre. It was horribly funny—music that would make your hair stand on end, fantastic yapping and meowing, extravagant costumes and make-ups, like the most extraordinarily brightly colored Chinese figurines. The effect was beautiful in color. We were surrounded by Chinese whose pig-tails hung over the backs of the benches where they were seated. All the time we were there we felt like scratching ourselves. I had the satisfaction, however, of leaving the theatre without having taken anything away from my neighbors.”

He traveled to the Redwoods, or as he called them “the Big Trees of California,” which were about the size of the Liberty statue and pedestal he was proposing.

“We arrived by night at a sort of hotel . . . in the depths of the forest. First of all, one must pull himself together, for the walk is enough to take away anyone’s breath. After supper I left the house and strolled around in the moonlight. I saw some of the Big Trees, these colossi, here and there among trees of ordinary size. But the ordinary trees themselves are so big that the arms of two men can scarcely encompass them. The impression we get in the midst of this forest is truly amazing; and you wonder what effect this spectacle had on the first man who, without warning, came upon it.”

He moved south, to Los Angeles, which he understood to be only underground mines; Milton; and then, via Stockton, returned to the East. On his journey back, which took six days and five nights, Bartholdi caught a snapshot of America, two minutes here or there that captured the young nation in the throes of change. Denver, then a town only twelve years old, showed signs of robustness: “In this city of 18,000 souls I counted
ten
barber shops and
three
music stores.” In St. Louis he saw “the militia staggering under tin helmets.” At a train stop, a woman accosted him as he was sketching and eventually told him that she gave lectures on a woman’s right to vote. “She stops at Lausanne. I am told that women voted there yesterday.”

The plains held the people who had lived in America long before it was America. “Indians, with red-painted faces and wearing European trousers, come to see us go by (their wives carrying little children in baskets on their backs), smile stupidly and ask for money or a chew of tobacco.”

He saw traces of the great westward migration, “the skeletons of old hoop-skirts. . . . This ancient road is frequently visible, marked only by a few dusty furrows; it is like a prolonged foot-path, a track painfully worn in the earth by innumerable emigrants who, for month after month, dragged themselves over these endless spaces in order to cross the vast continent.”

The majesty of American bridges thrilled Bartholdi’s imagination. He was not just sketching landmarks or landscapes but recording technological miracles. In St. Louis, he wrote: “When you observe the attention given here to training and education you understand the great achievements of Americans. They apply themselves in the highest degree of educational problems. It is one of the finest things about America—and the noblest.”

In pencil, he captured a saddled horse, the prairie streets of Cheyenne, Wyoming, a woman holding her baby in what appeared to be a stiff cradleboard. On other pages he captured not just scenes but events, including a lovely sketch of a locomotive pulling into the Washington, D.C., station with dogs and people passing beside the track.

He returned to New York for the final weeks of his trip. “All my work hangs by threads,” he wrote to his mother. “I must make all possible arrangements before leaving in order to be sure that they will not break after I have left. Mine has been a big diplomatic task and I have great hopes. This voyage will probably have a profound influence on my whole career, and I am sure that good things will come of it.”

He toured Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, probably in hopes he might win a few jobs for funeral monuments. He had designed several such monuments in France, including one for the Colmar National Guard soldiers fallen during the battle at Horbourg Bridge. The cemetery also offered the highest point in Brooklyn from which to view Bedloe’s Island.

On his last visit to Washington, D.C., Bartholdi witnessed the city cleaning itself up for the return of Congress. “Went to the Capitol, still under repair, to see Trumbull’s paintings—too slick. America is an adorable woman chewing tobacco.”

On Saturday, October 7, Bartholdi sailed toward home. “Farewell view of the bay and Bedloe’s Island. I have the same conversation about it as I had when I first arrived.”

His talk might have, to his mind, echoed his thoughts of five months earlier, but his career prospects had expanded. He was departing with the good news that he would win the commission for Brattle Street Church in Boston, which would help defray the cost of his trip, ten thousand francs plus the sum for the boat ticket.

“I am very glad to come here,” he admitted to his mother, “for the place is most extraordinary. It is really a very good thing to see the world in its various aspects, to encounter customs and ideas from an outside viewpoint.

“As I study the Americans, the great question that concerns me is to discover what is the value among peoples of the ideal.
‘Der Mensch lebt nicht von Brot allein.’
(‘Man doth not live by bread alone.’) Here this is sometimes forgotten, but not as often as America is accused of forgetting it.”

“For want of anything better, I shall confine myself to saying that I am very well pleased with my journey in every respect—that I thank you for seeing (America) through my eyes and most especially for having given me my eyes and my ability to see with them,” he wrote to her on her birthday. “The older I grow, the more I understand all your thoughts and I thank Heaven for having given me a mother like you.”

Just a year earlier, Bartholdi had sought cover near the Horbourg Bridge, directing snipers to fire on the Badois. Four months before, he had escaped a Paris in ruins. Now he headed home, hoping to convince French funders to make his scheme of building Liberty a reality.

Bartholdi could boast the support of a handful of relatively influential men in New York and Boston. On the basis of his conversation with President Grant, he could expect Grant to accept the statue if the French were able to give it. Grant had even promised to authorize a home for it, though he was facing reelection the following fall. Bartholdi would need to act before Grant lost office. Bartholdi had promised the Americans that the French would pay for the actual statue. Somehow, someone needed to actually come up with the money to make Liberty a reality.

7
The Workshop of the Giant Hand

Once in Paris, Bartholdi returned to his atelier on rue Vavin, having not seen the place since its windows were shattered by gunfire back in the spring. Over one of the hallway doors he painted a picture of his beloved Colmar. He intricately re-created its roofs and steeples, a view that, to his mind, he would never see again. Bartholdi attached a huge half nest to the top of the wall and placed inside a stuffed stork, the symbol of good luck in Alsace. But the stork wore the spiked helmet of a Prussian soldier, and it gazed down over the town. Bartholdi ruefully titled the work
The Sentinel of Colmar.

He must have wanted his clients to know that he would never forget his homeland, nor would he give up his disdain for the villains who had stolen Colmar. This was not heavy-handed propaganda. Bartholdi preferred a mischievous, whimsical expression of his true feelings. That same whimsy propelled his desire to create Liberty; he wanted to make the largest statue in the world more than he cared to espouse an ardent political view or lavish praise on America. He would approach this desire methodically.

Despite the terrors that Bartholdi had recently lived through in France, he knew it was time to become practical, to turn his attention to business. In his elegant atelier, with its studded-back velvet chairs and the maquettes parading across the shelves of the dark, carved highboy, the prospect of constructing Liberty must have seemed very distant indeed. A
statuaire
could not just carve alone in a fever of inspiration. He had to convince whole teams of people, in some cases whole nations, to join his efforts. He had to beguile people who were loath to spend money, assuring them that his work—which served as neither housing, nor library, nor fort—needed to be built. Bartholdi had to sell not only the idea of the Liberty sculpture, but also the illusion that in America he had been overwhelmed by the enthusiasm for his grand idea.

Then there was the matter of Liberty herself. Upon returning to his studio, Bartholdi began fashioning new maquettes. For the design of colossal statuary, he had certain requirements, the first being that the character or idea behind the piece had to be in harmony with the work’s size. “The immensity of form should be filled with the immensity of thought,” Bartholdi later wrote, “and the spectator should be impressed with the greatness of the idea expressed in the great form without being obliged to have recourse to comparative measurements in order to receive an emotion.”

Bartholdi did not want each picture of Liberty to require a person seated at her toes to awe his public. The form itself needed to be awesome, and the idea that the work transmitted sufficiently grand.

Second, the site and surroundings of the monument should aid this effect. “With regard to a choice of site, the frame should help the subject. It can be improved by architectural effects, such as flights of steps, but above all a site favoured by Nature should be sought out. The neighbourhood of large masses should be avoided. The artist should endeavour to find a site in which the line of the ground and the colouring of the background will aid him in producing an impression.”

Bedloe’s Island offered a perfect location to set off the colossus, isolated from the visual clutter of Manhattan but enhanced by the distant mountains.

Third, Bartholdi required economy of design: “There should be great simplicity in the movement and in the exterior lines. . . . Moreover, the work should . . . not present black spots or exaggerated recesses. . . . The enlargement of the details or their multiplicity is to be feared. Either fault destroys the proportion of the work. Finally the design should have a summarized character, such as one would give to a rapid sketch.”

At another point, Bartholdi put the matter more cleanly. “I have a horror of all frippery in detail in sculpture. The forms and effects of that art should be broad, massive and simple.”

His study for “Egypt Bringing Progress to Asia,” which he had intended for the Suez Canal, had depicted the fellah in almost realistic form, with the woman’s head topped by a low headband, with a veil draping behind. She clutched a lantern or flaming torch in her hand, and cocked one knee as if stepping forward. Her empty hand in those models seemed unresolved. She cupped the palm horizontally near her thigh.

For his revised Liberty, Bartholdi needed to translate the “Egypt Bringing Progress” garment into something more like a
stola,
the traditional robe for Roman women. He experimented with the headdress, rejecting the traditional Phrygian cap—the soft hat granted to a freed slave and symbol of the French revolution—probably because it would be too strange visually.

Liberty’s face, at that point, was not fixed. Her features varied in Bartholdi’s sketches and models. For her head, he settled on a rayed diadem almost exactly like the one worn by the figure in Élias Robert’s statue of
France Crowning Art and Industry,
which had been placed on top of the entrance to the 1855 World’s Exposition in Paris, where Bartholdi had exhibited his Rapp statue. Bartholdi might have consulted the photo of that work in his archives. Seven long, sharp spikes now rose up from Liberty’s crown.

He considered having his Liberty hold a broken chain, symbolizing freedom, but that would have made more sense had the statue commemorated the end of the Civil War, the original concept inspiring Laboulaye’s dinner in 1865. Bartholdi now saw the statue as a commemoration of the two nations’ common quest for democracy. With the centenary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence five years ahead, Bartholdi put a tablet of law in her hand, resting against her hip. Lest anyone doubt the statue’s relevance to the centennial, he included the date of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Synchronizing the statue with the hundredth anniversary would allow just enough time to drum up support for the project as a whole and, more important, provide Americans with a firm funding deadline. He tucked the broken chains under her foot.