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 had also been misaligned. The cause(s) of the misalignments are undetermined, but a few hypotheses have been suggested. The first hypothesis proposed was that Viollet le Duc—the engineer who initially worked on the project with Bartholdi and who designed the structural reinforcement of the arm and the head (displayed in 1876 at the Centennial exhibition in Philadelphia) had died after having completed those two sections—and had employed engineering methods that differed significantly from those of the better-known bridge engineer Gustave Eiffel, who had finished the remainder of the work on the statue, and who is generally credited for