The Little Mermaid (statue) cities; others include: "Manneken Pis" in Brussels, the Statue of Liberty in New York and "Christ the Redeemer" in Rio de Janeiro. In several cases, cities have commissioned statues for such a purpose, such as with Singapore's "Merlion". The statue was commissioned in 1909 by Carl Jacobsen, son of the founder of Carlsberg, who had been fascinated by a ballet about the fairytale in Copenhagen's Royal Theatre and asked the ballerina, Ellen Price, to model for the statue. The sculptor Edvard Eriksen created the bronze statue, which was unveiled on August 23, 1913. The statue's head was modelled after Price,
Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi attended the Lycee Louis-le-Grand in Paris, and received a baccalaureat in 1852. He then went on to study architecture at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts as well as painting under Ary Scheffer in his studio in the Rue Chaptal, now the Musée de la Vie Romantique. Later, Bartholdi turned his attention to sculpture, which afterward exclusively occupied him. In 1853, Bartholdi submitted a Good Samaritan-themed sculptural group to the Paris Salon of 1853. The statue was later recreated in bronze. Within two years of his Salon debut, Bartholdi was commissioned by his hometown of Colmar to sculpt a bronze