Place des États-Unis of the American diplomatic mission. Purchased by the "Committee of Americans in Paris" and offered to the City of Paris, the model was a fund-raising tool, displayed with the aim of inspiring support for the building of the full-sized statue and its transport across the Atlantic. The model remained in place until 1888. Famed publisher Joseph Pulitzer (1847–1911), impressed by the work Bartholdi had done in executing the Statue of Liberty, commissioned him to produce another statue, one emblematic of the French-American friendship. The subject matter, General George Washington and Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette, comrades-in-arms during the American
Conservation-restoration of the Statue of Liberty the statue's remarkable structure. The second hypothesis was that the Americans, after having uncrated the different sections of the statue in 1886, incorrectly reassembled the structural framework. The third hypothesis is that the statue’s creator, Bartholdi, was aesthetically dissatisfied when the statue was fully assembled and displayed in Paris on or just prior to July 4, 1884, and that he must have willingly sacrificed the structural integrity for his aesthetic vision. One of the main architects of the restoration project was initially convinced that the second hypothesis was correct, but according to a quoted and published statement, recent research had