Liberty Enlightening the World

"Liberty Enlightening the World" is the statue's real name — the one French sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi gave her, not the nickname the harbor gave her later. And tucked in her left arm is a detail most people walk right past: a stone tablet inscribed JULY IV MDCCLXXVI. July 4, 1776, in Roman numerals. She has been carrying the date of American independence since the day she was dedicated in 1886.

The statue was a gift from the people of France, conceived to mark the centennial of American independence and the alliance that helped win it. Bartholdi designed the figure; Gustave Eiffel — the same engineer behind the tower in Paris — built the iron framework beneath her copper skin. She was assembled in France, dismantled into more than two hundred crates, shipped across the Atlantic, and raised again in New York Harbor, where President Grover Cleveland dedicated her on October 28, 1886. The seven points of her crown stand for the seven seas and continents; the torch in her raised hand is the light her name promises. This portrait renders her in the American engraving tradition — the dignified register of the currency plate and the antiquarian woodcut — cream on dark, the torch arm leading.

This piece is part of the America 250 collection — Iron Union Co.'s designs marking the 250th anniversary of American independence. The tablet she carries reads 1776; the dates below her read 1776 — 2026. Two hundred and fifty years measured against a monument that has held the founding date in her arms for nearly a century and a half. It stands alongside the heraldic eagle of 250 Years Of Freedom, the founder portraits of Washington and Jefferson, and the Declaration's own opening words in When In The Course.

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