The Statue of the Republic is a 24-foot-high (7.3 m) gilded bronze sculpture in Jackson Park, Chicago, Illinois. The statue was built in 1918 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago and the Illinois statehood centennial. The statue was funded by the Benjamin Ferguson Fund., which commissioned Daniel Chester French, the sculptor of the original 65-foot-tall (20 m) statue that stood on the grounds of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, to sculpt this smaller replica. Henry Bacon, architect of the Lincoln Memorial, designed the pedestal for the 1918 Republic.
The original statue stood in front of the Court of Honor at the World's Columbian Exposition. However, in 1896, the original 65-foot statue succumbed to a fire, destroying it. The current statue stands on the site of the Exposition's famous Electricity Building.
The statue is widely known in Chicago by the colloquial name of the "Golden Lady." It was designated a Chicago Landmark on June 4, 2003.
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Famous quotes containing the words statue of, statue and/or republic:
“The statue of Freedom has not been cast yet, the furnace is hot, we can all still burn our fingers.”
—Georg Büchner (1813–1837)
“The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“It was the most ungrateful and unjust act ever perpetrated by a republic upon a class of citizens who had worked and sacrificed and suffered as did the women of this nation in the struggle of the Civil War only to be rewarded at its close by such unspeakable degradation as to be reduced to the plane of subjects to enfranchised slaves.”
—Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919)