He then went on to study architecture at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts[citation needed] as well as painting under Ary Scheffer[3][5] in his studio in the Rue Chaptal, now the Musée de la Vie Romantique.

Within two years of his Salon debut, Bartholdi was commissioned by his hometown of Colmar to sculpt a bronze memorial of Jean Rapp, a Napoleonic General.

The lighthouse, which was to be called Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia and shaped as a massive, draped figure holding a torch, was not commissioned.

Bartholdi served in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 as a squadron leader of the National Guard, and as a liaison officer to Italian General Giuseppe Garibaldi, representing the French government and the Army of the Vosges.

Distraught over his region's defeat, over the following years he constructed a number of monuments celebrating French heroism in the defense against Germany.

The idea, which had first been broached to him in 1865 by his friend Édouard René de Laboulaye, resulted in the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.

[5] He also remained active with diverse mediums, including oil painting, watercolor, photography, and drawing,[5] and received the rank of Commander of the Legion of Honor in 1886.

[5] In 1893, Bartholdi and his wife visited the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where his Washington and Lafayette sculptural group was exhibited.

These troubles in his ancestral home of Alsace are purported to have further influenced Bartholdi's own great interest in independence, liberty, and self-determination.

[clarification needed] On July 4, 1880, the statue was formally delivered to the American minister in Paris, the event being celebrated by a great banquet.

[3] In October 1886, the structure was officially presented as the joint gift of the French and American people, and installed on Bedloe's Island in New York Harbor.

[3] Bartholdi's hometown Colmar (modern political administrative region of Grand Est) has a number of statues and monuments by the sculptor, as well as a museum founded in 1922 in the house in which he was born, at 30 Rue des Marchands.