The beautiful widowed heiress who may have been the model for the Statue of Liberty
When the Statue of Liberty was unveiled in New York Harbor on the rain-soaked afternoon of October 28, 1886, enormous crowds of New Yorkers attending the ceremony on Bedloe’s (now Liberty) Island or watching from the Battery cheered with delight.
But soon after the French flag covering Lady Liberty’s face was removed and her features revealed to the world, New Yorkers began wondering: who was the inspiration behind the statue’s face?
The general consensus is that French sculptor Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi—who had spent two decades creating and completing the statue he described as “the dream of my life”—modeled the sturdy jawline and determined expression after that of his mother (above).
Bartholdi (above, in 1886) apparently revealed this in 1876 to a colleague in France, according to The Statue of Liberty Encyclopedia, by Barry Moreno.
But other ideas abound: the face is that of the Roman goddess Libertas, an Egyptian peasant, even an unnamed man.
But one intriguing theory has it that Bartholdi based the statue’s face on that of a French-English widowed heiress, Isabella Boyer, who was considered one of the most beautiful women in the world in the late 19th century.
Boyer, born in 1841 in Paris, relocated to New York in 1863 when she was 22 to marry Isaac Merritt Singer, the founder of the Singer Sewing Machine Company. Singer, 52 years old at the time, gained fortune and fame after he improved the functionality and accessibility of home sewing machines.
For 12 years, Boyer lived in New York as Singer’s wife and the mother of six of his children. (Singer had 24 children by five women during his lifetime, so he was quite a player.) In 1875, Singer died. Her share of his estate made her rich in her own right.
Boyer (below) moved to England with her children after Singer’s death. But apparently she returned to Paris at some point, as this is where she met Bartholdi, according to Christopher Winn, author of I Never Knew That About New York.
What was their romance like, and how long did it last? The details are a mystery. And based on the only authentic photo of Boyer I could find, it’s not exactly obvious that she really was the inspiration for the statue’s strong, almost stern facial features.
But it’s a romantic idea—and the possibility that Lady Liberty’s face was based on that of a woman the sculptor loved broadens the backstory of this icon of freedom.
[Top and second photos: Musee Bartholdi; third photo: Edward Moran via Wikipedia; fourth image: unknown; fifth photo: Wikipedia]
