The Postcard
A postally unused postcard that was published by The New Yorker. The artwork was by Charles E. Martin
Charles E. Martin
Charles Elmer Martin was born in 1910 in Chelsea, Massachusetts.
Charles was a prolific and respected illustrator. His work appeared in Time and Life magazines, Harper's, The Saturday Evening Post, The Saturday Review, Punch, Esquire, and The New Yorker.
His work was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum and various galleries. He is represented in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of the City of New York, Library of Congress and at Syracuse University.
Charles passed away in 1995.
The Statue of Liberty
The Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World; French: La Liberté Éclairant le Monde) is a colossal neoclassical sculpture on Liberty Island in New York Harbor within New York City, in the United States.
The copper statue, a gift from the people of France to the people of the United States, was designed by the French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, and its metal framework was built by Gustave Eiffel. Eiffel's design made the statue one of the earliest examples of curtain wall construction, in which the exterior of the structure is not load bearing, but is instead supported by an interior framework. He included two interior spiral staircases, to make it easier for visitors to reach the observation point in the crown.
The statue was dedicated on the 28th. October 1886. General Charles Stone claimed on the day of dedication that no man had died during the construction of the statue. This was not true, however, as Francis Longo, a thirty-nine year old Italian labourer, had been killed when an old wall fell on him.
The statue is a figure of Libertas, a robed Roman liberty goddess. She holds a torch above her head with her right hand, and in her left hand she carries a tabula ansata inscribed JULY IV MDCCLXXVI (July 4, 1776 in Roman numerals), the date of the U.S. Declaration of Independence.
A broken shackle and chain lie at her feet as she walks forward, commemorating the recent national abolition of slavery.
After its dedication, the statue became an icon of freedom and of the United States, seen as a symbol of welcome to immigrants arriving by sea.
Bartholdi was inspired by a French law professor and politician, Édouard René de Laboulaye, who is said to have commented in 1865 that any monument raised to U.S. independence would properly be a joint project of the French and U.S. peoples.
The Franco-Prussian War delayed progress until 1875, when Laboulaye proposed that the French finance the statue and the U.S. provide the site and build the pedestal. Bartholdi completed the head and the torch-bearing arm before the statue was fully designed, and these pieces were exhibited for publicity at international expositions.
The torch-bearing arm was displayed at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, and in Madison Square Park in Manhattan from 1876 to 1882.
Fundraising proved difficult, especially for the Americans, and by 1885 work on the pedestal was threatened by lack of funds. Publisher Joseph Pulitzer, of the New York World, started a drive for donations to finish the project, and attracted more than 120,000 contributors, most of whom gave less than a dollar.
The statue was built in France, shipped overseas in crates, and assembled on the completed pedestal on what was then called Bedloe's Island. One of the fingers was made to Bartholdi's exacting specifications by a coppersmith in the southern French town of Montauban.
The statue's completion was marked by New York's first ticker-tape parade and a dedication ceremony presided over by President Grover Cleveland.
The monument was temporarily closed in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, partially reopening that June. Public access to the balcony around the torch has been barred since 1916.
The height of the copper statue (to the top of the torch) is 151 feet (46 meters). From ground level to the top of the torch the monument is 305 feet (93 meters).
Major restorations of the monument took place in 1938, 1984–1986, and 2011–2012.
In 2009 the monument attracted 3.2 million visitors.
