![]() ![]() Charles Sumner that culminated in the creation of the sculptor’s masterpiece. The most recent issue of the Capitol Dome magazine has an interesting article by Katya Miller on the productive friendship between Thomas Crawford and Sen. The bronze Statue of Freedom, facing east over the central entrance, crowns the dome of the United States Capitol. Check out these posts for more perspectives on the statue’s history and meaning: Building Freedom: The Story of an Enslaved Man and a Statue December 2, 1863: The Speech That Was Never Given at the Capitol We have two other blog posts about the Statue of Freedom. The statue was to be the crown jewel of the dome atop the Capitol Rotunda. Thomas, the engineer who supervised the installation, is shown here courtesy of the Architect of the Capitol, whose Flickr feed includes a high resolution image of the photograph. Meigs, supervising engineer of the Capitol expansion, received the conceptual drawings from Thomas Crawford, an American neoclassical artist, for the Statue of Freedom. A copy of that photograph, preserved in the collections of Charles F. Statue of Freedom Images The Statue of Freedom, simply referred to as Freedom was an animate plaster statue depicting a Greco-Roman woman crafted by the Italian sculptor Thomas Gibson Crawford. The flag of the United States was unfurled from the statue and at that moment a photographer took a picture of the event from the west front side of the Capitol. The figure is made of bronze, is 19 feet high, weighs 15,000 pounds, was designed by CRAWFORD, and was cast by CLARK MILLS.” The New York Times, for example, had only a two-sentence notice in its dispatches from Washington that day: “The head or crowning feature at the statue of Freedom was successfully hoisted to its position on the dome of the Capitol, to-day, amid the cheers of the spectators below and a salute of cannon. The event was purposely low-key, even though it was marked by a volley of artillery from the Union forts that encircled the city. ![]() One hundred and fifty years ago shortly after noon on December 2, 1863, workmen bolted the head of the Statue of Freedom atop the Capitol Dome, completing the statue’s installation. ![]()
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