Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty (5 page)

Now, the administration of the École des Beaux-Arts in France, the national art school, declared a priority of collecting photographic records of historical monuments. That made Bartholdi’s mission not as unusual as one might expect.

Gérôme, who had stunned the art world with his first painting, the neo-Greco
Cockfight,
had just been awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honor for his monumental work
The Age of Augustus,
and was the more important of the two guests. Gérôme reigned in the Boîte à Thé, a stylish group of ateliers near Notre Dame, where luminaries of the age, including Johannes Brahms and Ivan Turgenev, would visit for festivals and riotous puppet shows. Bartholdi, ten years younger, was probably considered to be the photographic assistant on the trip, as it had become an artistic vogue to collect images of antiquities to use as backgrounds for paintings. He was by no means a photographic expert but had tinkered a little with the technology. Charlotte noted in June 1854 that Bartholdi had taken a photography lesson. In September she remarked that Auguste had arrived with equipment and they had spent the day setting up his darkroom, “which occupied him greatly.”

Bartholdi wasn’t the first photographer to venture into the East with his camera. In 1839, Frédéric Goupil-Fesquet had traveled to Egypt with the painter Horace Vernet, and brought back the first images of the country. Nine years later, the writers Maxime Du Camp and Gustave Flaubert went to Egypt, Nubia, Palestine, and Syria, and Du Camp took hundreds of photographs, which were then made popular through their widely distributed travelogue.

As opposed to the daguerreotype, which required a twenty-two-minute exposure, the new salt print, or calotype, could be fixed in two minutes. With this shorter posing time, people more easily agreed to be photographed, and pictures could be taken outdoors in challenging weather conditions. Bartholdi practiced by taking portraits of his brother Charles and by posing friends and family members in their garden. He had not yet mastered the medium, and in the overexposures one could barely make out these ghost men, leaning against each other, wearing hats, sitting cross-legged.

Bartholdi needed to improve his skills but the new technologies made the process relatively easy. The camera itself was fairly small, the tripod almost identical to a modern one. Ordinary paper would suffice to catch the image and could be coated in any dark place—a tent, for example—a few hours before making the exposure. To print, the photographer would carefully pack the fixed paper negatives and develop them in a darkroom back home. The biggest challenge for the traveling photographer would be transporting water to rinse the prints, keeping everything free of dust and sand, and not splashing one’s skin with acid.

For an artist of the period, photography captured in an instant subjects or backgrounds for paintings. Gérôme was on the hunt for exotic visuals to pair with his classical images, eager for fresh material to excite the juries at the next Salon. For Bartholdi, the relationship with Gérôme would propel him into the milieu he hoped to inhabit. Gérôme would be intriguing company, too. His sharp wit made conversation lively if somewhat combative. He favored whimsy: he kept a pet monkey, Jacques, who dined at his table in coat and white cravat. Gérôme possessed an intelligent eye and strong work discipline, which would demonstrate to Bartholdi how to endure whatever combination of hardships was necessary for the sake of one’s art.

On November 8, 1855, Bartholdi set off on his journey from Marseilles. He was, at twenty-one, dark and serious, with a slight frame, a black fluff of hair, piercing brown eyes, and a strong nose. The
Osiris
carried not only young Bartholdi but also former consul turned businessman Ferdinand de Lesseps, traveling with a fifteen-man International Commission. De Lesseps was headed to Egypt to plan the most significant engineering miracle conceived at the time: the Suez Canal.

Ferdinand de Lesseps had been raised for foreign service. At twenty-eight, he earned the post of consul general in Cairo and received the Cross of the Legion of Honor for his distinguished service. When Muhammad Ali invaded Syria and essentially annexed Palestine, he declared he would impose life imprisonment on all Bethlehem males of fighting age. De Lesseps begged him to show mercy instead. The Syrian people worshipped de Lesseps for that intervention. For years afterward, he could not travel through the city without people slaughtering lambs in the street for him, throwing flowers and gifts, and burning incense under the nose of his horse.

De Lesseps also earned the love of Muhammad Ali’s son, Said Pasha, by giving him refuge from his father’s war against Said’s obesity. Fat Egyptians were considered unfit for military service and, therefore, unmanly. Said’s father put him through fourteen training exercises a day, including “running around the walls of the town or climbing the masts of a ship.” Exhausted and weak-headed from his light diet, Said would retreat by special arrangement to the French consulate. There de Lesseps would secretly provide him with his favorite dish, macaroni. De Lesseps eventually moved on to other posts and left the diplomatic corps but the Egyptian ruler’s son never forgot his kindness—or his macaroni.

When Muhammad Ali’s immediate successor was murdered, Said won the throne as Wali, the Arabic term for governor. Said soon invited forty-nine-year-old de Lesseps to his Cairo palace as his honored guest. De Lesseps knew exactly what he wanted from the Wali. Two years earlier, he had sketched a plan for creating the Suez Canal, a waterway that would cross the Egyptian desert to link the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. Travel from London to Bombay would be cut from ten thousand miles down to four thousand, shaving two months off the journey.

The canal was not a simple proposition. It would have to extend one hundred miles across desert. The two seas differed in their levels by only six and a half inches, but the canal would need to be deep enough for the enormous steamers ferrying goods back and forth from Europe to the East. De Lesseps wrote up a memorandum about the benefits for the Wali should he approve the plan: “Mohammed-Said has already recognized that there is no other work of such grandeur, such a title to glory, such a passport to riches. The name of the Prince who opens the great Canal will be blessed century after century to the most remote posterity.”

Should Bartholdi have missed de Lesseps’s presence on board the
Osiris,
he would have been hard pressed to overlook de Lesseps’s reception in Alexandria when they arrived on November 18. Government ministers and the Wali’s private secretary personally escorted de Lesseps and his entourage to land. On the quay, the Wali’s grand carriages waited to take the former consul and his men to their hotel.

There was no entourage to greet Bartholdi. He had enough money in his pocket to survive at least six months in Egypt but under enough financial stricture that he and his friends conferred at length about renting a barque to travel on the Nile. Yet Cairo immediately fulfilled the promise of exoticism, with its twisting, labyrinthine streets sometimes so narrow a rider on mule brushed the walls on either side with his feet. Minarets pierced the sky. Throngs of men in turbans of white, black, red, or green or of women in scarlet robes shouted and sang in the streets. In the city’s markets one could buy everything from corn to slaves to a gold-encrusted Koran.

After a few weeks in Cairo, Gérôme and Bartholdi, along with two of Gérôme’s friends, decided to hire a boat to travel up the Nile. They left behind two artist companions: one of these, Léon Belly, was a difficult man who had come to intensely dislike Gérôme. Gérôme appeared to be unfazed by the hostility. He would later write of this time: “Happy epoch! Care-free, full of hope, and with the future before us. The sky was blue.”

The boat came with a captain, a second in command, seven sailors and oarsmen, and a cook. There was a cabin and a canopied place on deck with a small table where they could eat all of their meals. Bartholdi sketched and photographed everything that struck him as the boat slowly crept with the wind on the Nile’s black waters. He produced so much work that he soon ran out of supplies. He wrote to a school friend back in Paris asking him to send 150 half sheets of paper, citric acid, silver nitrate, twelve tubes of white paint, six of burnt sienna, pins, erasers, tobacco, and other sundries.

The atmosphere on board was festive. Gérôme decided he would go unshaven for the trip in a bid to look more native. At times they dressed in turbans and caftans. As they headed upriver in their sun-worn barque, they spotted de Lesseps’s luxury ship ferrying the businessman back to Cairo.

The young men passed the town of Sheik Ibada and came to Kena, where twelve-year-old girls looked “more for tips than pleasure,” having turned to prostitution for survival. In Kena, Gérôme decided to shave his head to go along with his growing beard. “I’m close to looking like an Egyptian,” he said. “I’m dark enough.” They sailed on to Aswan and the Elephantine Island, with its temples and its naked Nubian boys. The girls wore only a waist fringe while the adults were swathed in white cotton. Bartholdi photographed dusty alleyways, minarets against mountain ranges, and fortress walls that crumbled down cliffs to the river below.

The Frenchmen on the boat gave each other “local” names. Gérôme became Abou-Gérôme. Bartholdi earned his nickname while out hunting with the group. The problem, as his companions saw it, was that Bartholdi would target only small game so close to his gun that the barrel was practically pressing against the animal. For this he was dubbed “Abou-Portant,” playing on the term “à bout portant,” meaning “point blank.” Trying to shake the name, Bartholdi saw a bird rise up in the sky and took his shot. The bird dropped and he exulted, believing his days of being teased were over. Then the bird soared up into the air again. Bartholdi had just scared it enough to drop its fish. While the others gleefully mocked him, Bartholdi pointed out that only a unique hunter shot flying fish. “I am enchanted to know that you are a bad hunter,” his mother, Charlotte, wrote him after he conveyed the story to her.

In February, Léon Belly, the artist who despised Gérôme, joined the group near Thebes. “We were constantly mocking [Bartholdi’s] paintings and drawings,” Belly wrote, though he admitted that Bartholdi was the only one doing any work. “As for his color studies, even though he is a beginner and they are rough at the edges, they were much better than those of Gérôme, who was making so much fun of him.”

By the end of the trip, Bartholdi had made one hundred negatives and two hundred drawings. Bartholdi saw not only wonders in Egypt, but also scenes of human tragedy. At one point, the group visited a prison, where they encountered teenagers and old men so close to death they seemed to be rotting. Bartholdi sketched the profile of one proud prisoner staring defiantly into the distance. As with almost all of the numerous drawings Bartholdi made throughout his life, he included the subject’s name—Esnée. This personal approach to portraiture suggested that he wished not merely to capture a man’s form, but to record his individuality.

In another town, he watched Albanians rage through the dusty alleys, pillaging and extorting money. They kidnapped the Egyptian men for their gangs, leaving behind wives and mothers in tears.

Bartholdi sketched and photographed many ancient ruins and cities, but also tried to capture scenes of daily life. He wrote: “Everything is fine except that people do not want to let themselves be molded, in photography some are afraid, the others move without stopping.” In another letter, Bartholdi commented: “What is absurd is that all these people when they pose, do not pose; this is even more absurd because when individuals (especially of the female sex) decide to pose for you, they laugh and do not remain for an instant in the same pose.”

The ancient monuments presented no such problems. He dug his tripod into the sand, peered through the lens, and in two minutes permanently captured something colossal. Two minutes to sear the temples of Luxor or Dendera onto film. When Bartholdi took a photograph of the sandstone colossi of Memnos, the twin renditions of Amenhotep III near Luxor, which sat nearly seventy feet tall, two turbaned men posed at the base to set a sense of scale. As Bartholdi took his picture, one of them moved. He appeared almost erased. Or what appears to be two men perhaps was really one man, who shifted and left his ghost next to the monument.

Egypt had a deep impact on Bartholdi as an artist. He wrote: “Egyptian art has been the object of profound admiration, not only in view of the masses of material, the millions of kilogrammes moved by the Egyptian people, but on account of its concrete and majestic character, in design and in form, of the works which we see. We are filled with profound emotion in the presence of these colossal witnesses, centuries old, of a past that to us is almost infinite, at whose feet so many generations, so many million existences, so many human glories, have rolled in the dust. These granite beings, in their imperturbable majesty, seem to be still listening to the most remote antiquity. Their kindly and impassable glance seems to ignore the present and to be fixed upon an unlimited future. These impressions are not the result simply of a beautiful spectacle, nor of the poetry of historic remembrances. They result from the character of the form and the expression of the work in which the design itself expresses, after a fashion, infinity.”

For all his love of the ancient, though, Bartholdi was a “modern” man. Certainly he thrilled at antiquity but he also applauded new technology and what he believed to be unquestioned European superiority.

“How adorable a thing is Egypt in all ways, for art, for manners, and its civilization which I had forgotten,” he wrote to a friend in the early winter of 1856. “She certainly has her charm. To write you, for example, I am obliged to confide my letter to couriers who with a bell on their foot will carry it from village to village until Cairo. This is very pretty, but does not offer very much security. Whatever one can say about Mohammed-Ali, it was he alone who sought to make something of Egypt. He made Europeans respected who hardly had been, organized administrations, schools, a little industry, he bought machines, etc. Since then, the administrations tended to go back to their original state, as have the schools. Industry goes similarly because the Arabs are too dazed and lazy to occupy themselves with it. The machines bought at great expense by Mohammed-Ali were magnificent. They rust in the Arsenal in a frightening disorder. The cavalry trumpets on top of weaving looms, the boilers, the cannonballs, the gears, the cannons, the keys of pianos, old windows, astronomical instruments with the butts of rifles . . . here is all of the Arsenal. This is a visible metaphor laid bare of the history of all things in Egypt. One has at hand all the perfect instruments to use, but one makes gears out of wood. . . . They appear to concern themselves with civilization only in order to make clear that they prefer not to make use of it. If Europeans could possess the land, they could probably make something from it but they could not get it except by a feat of skill and then it would be necessary that they were married. You can understand how in these conditions, this would almost be impossible.”