Musée d'Orsay Exhibition Traces Statue of Liberty's French Origins

An exhibition devoted to the origins of the Statue of Liberty opened on Tuesday at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, tracing the monument from its first conception to its inauguration in New York in 1886.

Titled "Liberty Enlightening the World," the show brings together sculptures, paintings and drawings alongside a virtual reality experience that documents the project's long journey.

The idea took shape in 1865, when the lawyer Édouard Laboulaye proposed to the sculptor Auguste Bartholdi that a monument be raised to celebrate Franco-American friendship, timed to the American centennial of 1876. The statue was planned as the largest ever built, standing 46 metres (151 ft) tall.

The exhibition details its making, its financing, and Bartholdi's collaboration with the architect Viollet-le-Duc and the engineer Gustave Eiffel, as well as its passage to the United States aboard a French Navy ship.

According to Juliette Chevée, curator of the Bartholdi Museum in the sculptor's birthplace of Colmar, the project was far more than a work of art. "It was not only an artistic adventure, but also a human experience, economic, financial, and political," she said, adding that the exhibition also seeks to highlight Bartholdi's work, which she said has been overshadowed over the centuries.

Chevée said the statue was first built in Paris at the Gaget, Gauthier & Cie workshop, where models and plaster were made at the actual scale of the monument. Wooden forms were then created in which copper sheets were hammered piece by piece. The statue was assembled in Paris for the first time, giving the city an impressive sight of the figure rising above its rooftops — a moment captured in original photographs, paintings and newspaper engravings included in the show.

The exhibition follows the entire arc of the project, from the artist's early ideas and the birth of the concept in the salons, where personalities and energies had to be rallied around it, through its assembly in Paris, its transport to New York and its reassembly in the city's port, culminating in its inauguration on 28 October 1886.

Chevée described the undertaking as extremely ambitious in its size, the number of people and personalities involved, and the funding it required. She said it was also very representative of the 19th-century spirit of belief in technical and human progress — a monument dedicated to freedom that she called a beautiful and optimistic idea, perhaps somewhat naive, but one that managed to mobilise all those energies.

Among the historic images on display are a print by Henri Meyer depicting the presentation of the monument to the United States Ambassador, Mr Morton, published in the Journal Illustré on 13 July 1884, and a painting of the French Navy ship Isère, which carried 210 crates containing 350 copper components of the statue and arrived in New York on 17 June 1886. Other works show the end of assembly, published in Illustration magazine on 23 October 1886, and the inauguration with fireworks in New York Harbor.

Visitors can also use virtual reality headsets as part of the exhibition, which runs until 31 January 2027.