Who designed the Statue of Liberty?

Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi designed the Statue of Liberty.

Bartholdi was a French sculptor who conceived the monumental figure and developed its artistic design. He imagined a colossal woman representing liberty, holding a torch in her raised right hand and a tablet bearing the date of American independence in her left. The statue was officially titled Liberty Enlightening the World and was given by France to the United States.

Bartholdi did not work alone. Engineer Gustave Eiffel and his team designed the statue’s internal iron framework, allowing the thin copper skin to remain flexible and withstand wind. This division of labor explains a frequent quiz mix-up: Eiffel was crucial to the engineering, but Bartholdi was the sculptor and designer.

Construction took place in France before the statue was disassembled, shipped across the Atlantic, and reassembled on Bedloe’s Island, now Liberty Island. It was dedicated on October 28, 1886. Bartholdi’s design drew on classical allegories of liberty and used a robed female figure rather than a literal portrait of a historical person.