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 became a lawyer and editor. Bartholdi's father, a property owner and counselor to the prefecture, died when Bartholdi was two years old. Afterwards, Bartholdi moved with his mother and his older brother Jean-Charles to Paris, where another branch of their family resided. With the family often returning to spend long periods of time in Colmar, the family maintained ownership and visited their house in Alsace, which later became the Bartholdi Museum. While in Colmar, Bartholdi took drawing lessons from Martin Rossbach. In Paris, he studied sculpture with Antoine Etex. He also studied architecture under Henri Labrouste and Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc. Bartholdi