Working on the Statue of Liberty Working on the Statue of Liberty Working on the Statue of Liberty, also known as Statue of Liberty, is a 1946 oil painting by American illustrator Norman Rockwell, showing workmen cleaning the torch held aloft by the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. The painting was created for the cover of an edition of "The Saturday Evening Post", published on 6 July 1946, from sketches that Rockwell made in March 1946. It depicts the cleaning of the amber-coloured glass of the torch, an operation undertaken annually each July. Rockwell focuses on just a small part of the Statue of
Statue of Liberty as an embodiment of the United States in the manner that Britannia was identified with the United Kingdom and Marianne came to represent France. Columbia had supplanted the earlier figure of an Indian princess, which had come to be regarded as uncivilized and derogatory toward Americans. The other significant female icon in American culture was a representation of Liberty, derived from Libertas, the goddess of freedom widely worshipped in ancient Rome, especially among emancipated slaves. A Liberty figure adorned most American coins of the time, and representations of Liberty appeared in popular and civic art, including Thomas Crawford's "Statue of