Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi including oil painting, watercolor, photography, and drawing. Bartholdi, who received the rank of Commander of the Legion of Honor in 1886, died of tuberculosis in Paris on 4 October 1904, aged 70. In 1876, he married Jeanne-Emile Baheux in Providence, Rhode Island. Throughout his life Bartholdi maintained his childhood family home in Colmar, France, and after his death in 1904, in 1922 it was made into the Bartholdi Museum. The work for which Bartholdi is most famous is "Liberty Enlightening the World", better known as the Statue of Liberty. Soon after the establishment of the French Third Republic, the project
Statue of Liberty past it. He was delighted to learn that the island was owned by the United States government—it had been ceded by the New York State Legislature in 1800 for harbor defense. It was thus, as he put it in a letter to Laboulaye: "land common to all the states." As well as meeting many influential New Yorkers, Bartholdi visited President Ulysses S. Grant, who assured him that it would not be difficult to obtain the site for the statue. Bartholdi crossed the United States twice by rail, and met many Americans who he thought would be sympathetic to the project.