Made of cast brass and painted with lifelike colors, it depicts Kamehameha I, and represents an important cultural and spiritual object for the local community.

Though the surface of the sculpture was originally finished with a brown chemical patina and gold leaf, it has become local tradition to paint the statue with lifelike colors, and it appears as such to this day.

[1] After searching several prominent U.S. cities for an appropriate artist, Gibson contracted Thomas Ridgeway Gould, a Boston sculptor living abroad in Florence, Italy, to create the statue.

Ironically, and unbeknownst to Honolulu officials, fishermen managed to recover the sunken statue, which was recognized and bought by a British ship captain[b] who then sold it in 1882 to the Hawaiian government for $875.

Due to the shipwreck, neither statue was on-hand in Hawaiʻi to fulfill Gibson's original plan of celebrating the 100th anniversary of Cook's arrival to the islands.

[3][4] During the initial stages of the statue's design, Gould and Gibson made efforts to create an accurate likeness of King Kamehameha's face, body, and clothing.

[16] There is also a photomontage version (see photo right), where the top half of John Baker in royal dress is composited with the legs of a native Hawaiian fisherman.

[17][18] The garments worn by the models, i.e. the sash(kāʻei), tied around the figure's waist and draped over his left shoulder, his feather helmet (mahiole), and his cloak (ʻahu ʻula), are now on display at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum.

While at the time, Hawaiians did wear sandals, it was only for traveling long distances or over heavy terrain, and the obviously Western Classical style of the shoes only compounds their inaccuracy.

[25] Throughout its history, maintenance of the sculpture has proven to be challenging to carry out due to jurisdictional confusion—though the statue is located on county land, it is unclear if it belongs to the state or not, and therefore deciding who should be responsible for caring for it can be difficult to determine.

Sometime after World War II, the County Department of Public Works in Hilo, Hawaii assumed responsibility for the statue's care; after government reorganization in 1973, the crew tasked with cleaning and repainting the sculpture was transferred to state control.

Upon visiting the sculpture for the first time, Wharton discovered that the statue's current coat of paint had faded due to ultraviolet (UV) light from the Sun, was lifting in many areas, and in some places had flaked away completely to reveal underlying corrosion.

Historical accounts provided little assistance to the investigation, as articles written on the sculpture at the time of its unveiling in the 1880s offered conflicting and often contradictory descriptions of the artwork.

An effort was made to interest young children and local students in the sculpture, in order to get adults talking about the Kamehameha the Great as a conservation object.

Once the brass surface had been cleaned, Wharton assessed the various stress cracks and gouges in the metal and determined that the damage was all relatively old, probably dating back to the shipwreck and its recovery from the sea.

After it was determined that the statue was in stable condition, any holes or gaps in the metal were filled in using a pH-neutral epoxy putty, and the brass surface was misted with a benzotriazole solution in order to prevent future corrosion.

[33] Once the treatment was complete, Wharton helped train a group of local volunteers to carry out annual maintenance on the sculpture, and to watch for and record any condition changes or damage.

[36] One of the statue's most important cultural functions is its role in the annual celebration of Kamehameha Day, a two-day festival starting on June 11 in which much of the Hawaiian population participates.