Auguste Bartholdi La Liberté éclairant le monde

In 1884, one could glimpse the Statue of Liberty from the Boulevard de Courcelles. The painter Paul-Joseph-Victor Dargaud depicted it in the Parisian landscape, while it was still mounted near the workshops that had built it. This painting provides a starting point for the Musée d’Orsay’s exhibition. Before becoming the emblem of New York, Liberty was part of the Parisian landscape for a time, during a construction project.

To understand how it arrived there, the narrative returns to Bartholdi’s early studies. The sculptor had imagined a beacon statue for the entrance to the Suez Canal. The project did not come to fruition, but the idea of a monumental figure bearing a light took another form with the Franco-American project. At Orsay, a terracotta model about fifty centimetres tall and a bronze study for the head bring the monument down to the workshop scale, at a moment when its silhouette was still taking shape.

Even before assembly, the statue began to reveal itself piece by piece. The hand and its torch were exhibited in Philadelphia in 1876, then the head in Paris at the Exposition Universelle of 1878. These presentations helped publicize the project while its supporters raised the funds. What remained was to construct a 46-metre-tall statue. The Parisian workshops hammered copper sheets two and a half millimetres thick, which were fixed to a metal frame designed by Gustave Eiffel after Viollet-le-Duc’s death.

Albert Fernique’s photograph shows the statue assembled in the Parisian workshops. A painting by Édouard Adam takes over, depicting L’Isère, the ship that carried it to New York after its dismantling. Between the two, the monument thought complete becomes again a collection of pieces to be packed, shipped across the Atlantic and reassembled. Parallel to the exhibition, a virtual reality experience retraces this journey.

Practical information
- Thursday late opening from 9:30 a.m. to 9:45 p.m.
- Closed on Mondays and on December 25.
- The virtual reality experience 'A Statue for Liberty' requires a dedicated ticket or a combined ticket with the exhibition.