The Man Who Designed the Statue of Liberty Painted the American Plains During His Trip Across the United States

9 min read

Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, the French sculptor who designed the Statue of Liberty, crossed the United States in 1871 and painted the American plains along the way. His View of the Midwest Plains records the open country he saw from the new transcontinental railroad, fifteen years before his colossal statue was dedicated in New York Harbor on October 28, 1886.

Picture the scene. A 36-year-old Frenchman sits in a swaying railcar somewhere west of Chicago, a sketchbook balanced on his knee. Outside the window, muted brown heath rolls toward low hills along the horizon. He has come to America to sell an idea so enormous that most people laugh at it: a copper woman taller than any statue since antiquity, standing at the gate of New York. And yet what stops his hand, what he feels compelled to paint, is the opposite of a monument: a vast, muted expanse of moorland under low hills, where two lone horsemen ride, dwarfed by the land around them. That tension, between the grandest structure of the nineteenth century and the quietest painting in Bartholdi's American sketchbooks, is the story of this picture.

Colmar, 1834: An Alsatian Trained First as a Painter

Bartholdi was born in 1834 in Colmar, in the Alsace region of France, close against the German border. His father died when he was two. When Auguste was nine, his mother Charlotte moved the family to Paris and enrolled her sons at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, placing them within reach of some of France's most accomplished teachers.

Here is the detail most visitors to Liberty Island never learn: before he ever touched clay, Bartholdi studied painting. He trained in the Paris studio of Ary Scheffer, the Romantic painter whose portraits and religious canvases were famous across Europe. Drawing and painting remained his private discipline for the rest of his life, the tool he reached for whenever he needed to think. A journey to Egypt in 1855 and 1856 filled his notebooks with studies of colossal pharaonic sculpture, and the seed of an obsession with scale was planted beside the Nile.

Then came catastrophe. In 1870 Prussia invaded France, and Bartholdi served in the war. France lost, and in 1871 Alsace, including his birthplace Colmar, was annexed by the new German Empire. The man who boarded a ship for America that summer was, in a painful sense, an exile from his own hometown. Liberty was not an abstraction for him. It was a wound.

June 1871: Five Months, One Continent, One Mission

Bartholdi landed in New York on June 21, 1871, carrying letters of introduction from Édouard de Laboulaye, the French jurist who had first proposed a Franco-American monument to liberty. His assignment was diplomatic as much as artistic: measure American enthusiasm, court American money, and find a site. Sailing into the harbor, he fixed almost immediately on Bedloe's Island, a small federal islet that every arriving ship had to pass. The location came first. The statue would be designed for it.

Then he went west. The transcontinental railroad had been completed only two years earlier, in 1869, and Bartholdi rode it nearly end to end. He met President Ulysses S. Grant. He visited Niagara Falls, Chicago, and St. Louis, called on Brigham Young in Salt Lake City, and reached San Francisco before turning back. The whole circuit consumed roughly five months, and through all of it he drew and painted: harbors, falls, prairies, faces.

Nineteenth-century French artists had a habit of turning national projects into personal reckonings. Géricault did it with a shipwreck, as we traced in our account of how Géricault painted a government cover-up in The Raft of the Medusa. Bartholdi did it with a continent. His American paintings are the field notes of a man auditioning a country for the role of liberty's home.

View of the Midwest Plains: What Bartholdi Saw from the Railroad

Somewhere on that westward run, the plains opened up, and Bartholdi painted them. View of the Midwest Plains, dated 1871, belongs to the group of painted studies he produced during the crossing. It's a traveler's picture, made at speed, by a man trained in Scheffer's studio who hadn't painted seriously for an audience in years and didn't need to. Nobody commissioned it. That's exactly why it feels honest.

View of the Midwest Plains, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, 1871. View print options

So what is the meaning of View of the Midwest Plains? Read it as a sculptor's measurement. Bartholdi thought in dimensions his whole life, and the Midwest handed him a dimension no European training had prepared him for: horizontal immensity. A country that looked like this, he reasoned, could absorb a statue of any size. In his letters home he marveled that everything in America was built big, and that a colossal monument would feel proportionate here rather than absurd. The plains painting is that argument in pigment.

It also sits inside a wider nineteenth-century conversation about vast land and human smallness, its two tiny riders swallowed by the sweep of the terrain. Caspar David Friedrich had spent decades teaching Europe that a bare horizon could carry more feeling than a crowded history painting, a theme we follow closely in our complete guide to Caspar David Friedrich's greatest masterpieces. Bartholdi's plains share that Romantic instinct, but with an American accent: the vastness here isn't melancholy. It's invitation.

Painter or Sculptor? Bartholdi's Two Careers

Was Bartholdi a painter or a sculptor? The honest answer is both, in sequence and then in parallel. Painting came first, through Scheffer's studio. Sculpture claimed his public career after his Egyptian journey, when the colossi of Thebes convinced him that scale itself could be a subject. By 1871 he had already proposed a gigantic lighthouse in the form of a robed woman for the Suez Canal, a project that never left the drawing board but rehearsed nearly every idea Liberty would later embody.

The two disciplines fed each other. His paintings and watercolors from the American trip functioned the way a modern architect's site photographs do: they captured light, distance, and atmosphere that no written note could hold. Back in Paris, those painted memories shaped decisions about how Liberty's silhouette had to read across miles of open water, a problem far closer to painting a horizon than to modeling a portrait bust.

After the American commission was secured, Bartholdi kept sculpting for France too. His Lion of Belfort, a monumental lion carved into a cliff face to honor the city's resistance during the Prussian siege, remains one of the most beloved monuments in France. The painter's eye never left him. It simply started working at the scale of mountains.

From Prairie Horizon to Copper Colossus, 1871 to 1886

Fifteen years separate the plains sketchbook from the finished statue. Fundraising stalled on both sides of the Atlantic, and the statue's iron skeleton had to be engineered by Gustave Eiffel after the original engineer's death. When Liberty Enlightening the World was finally dedicated on October 28, 1886, the copper figure rose 151 feet and 1 inch from base to torch, the tallest statue of its era. President Calvin Coolidge declared it a National Monument in 1924, and UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site in 1984. Roughly 4.5 million people visited in 2019 alone.

The 1871 paintings sit at the opposite pole of art-making: private, portable, unseen by the crowds. There's a strange kinship there with the most extreme case of unpublic art we've written about, the story of Goya painting Saturn Devouring His Son on his own dining-room wall. Goya's private picture was despair; Bartholdi's was reconnaissance. But both remind us that what an artist makes for no audience often tells us the most. The man who built the most photographed sculpture on Earth measured his ambition, first, in a small painting of two riders lost in open, hilly country.

Living with Bartholdi's Plains: Rooms, Light, and Placement

A horizon picture behaves differently on a wall than a portrait or a still life. It widens the room. View of the Midwest Plains works best at generous width above a sofa or sideboard, where its long sightline can do the same job a window does. In a study or home office, a smaller print size keeps the picture intimate, closer to the scale of the traveler's study it originally was. Its muted, earthbound palette also sits comfortably alongside our dark academia art prints, where restrained color and a sense of history set the tone.

The picture rewards a considered position. In a room that already carries strong pattern or color, its muted palette lets the horizon act as a resting point. On a large, bare wall, its long sightline has room to breathe, fitting for a painting about bigness, made by the one artist in history who understood American scale well enough to answer it with a 151-foot statue.

View of the Midwest Plains, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, 1871. View print options

Frequently Asked Questions

What does View of the Midwest Plains by Bartholdi depict?

It depicts a wide, muted expanse of rolling heath beneath low hills, with two lone horsemen in the foreground, a rider on a dark horse at the left and one on a pale horse at the right, country Bartholdi saw during his 1871 journey across the United States by transcontinental railroad. The painting is one of the travel studies he made while promoting the future Statue of Liberty.

Where can you see Bartholdi's original paintings and drawings?

The largest collection of Bartholdi's work is held at the Musée Bartholdi in Colmar, France, the artist's birthplace in Alsace. The museum preserves sculptures, models, paintings, and studies from across his career, including material connected to his American projects.

Why was Bartholdi traveling across the United States in 1871?

He arrived in New York on June 21, 1871 to promote the idea of a Franco-American monument to liberty proposed by Édouard de Laboulaye. During roughly five months he chose Bedloe's Island as the statue's site, met President Grant, and traveled by rail to San Francisco.

How did the 1871 trip influence the design of the Statue of Liberty?

The journey convinced Bartholdi that a colossal statue would suit American scale, and it fixed the harbor site the figure was designed for. Liberty Enlightening the World was dedicated on October 28, 1886, its copper figure rising 151 feet and 1 inch.

Which other famous works did Bartholdi create besides the Statue of Liberty?

His best-known French work is the Lion of Belfort, a monumental lion honoring the city's resistance during the Prussian siege of 1870-71. He also proposed a colossal lighthouse figure for the Suez Canal that anticipated many of Liberty's ideas.