Digital portrait falsely shared as picture of the woman who posed for the ‘Statue of Liberty’ - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
September 9, 2021
A photo is being shared on social media claiming it as the picture of the woman who posed for the iconic ‘Statue of Liberty’ sculpture in the United States of America. Let’s verify the claim made in the post.
Claim: Photo of the woman who posed for the iconic ‘Statue of Liberty’ sculpture in the United States of America.
Fact: The photo shared in the post shows a digitally created hyper-realistic portrait of the historic ‘Statue of Liberty’ sculpture. Bas Uterwijk, an Amsterdam-based artist had re-created this portrait of ‘Statue of Liberty’ using Artificial Intelligence software. Hence the claim made in the post is FALSE.
On reverse image search of the photo using the keywords, a similar photo was found published in an article published by the ‘New York Post’ on 02 July 2020. This article reported it as a hyper-realistic portrait of the iconic ‘Statue of Liberty’ sculpture located in New York, US. Bas Uterwijk, an Amsterdam-based artist had reportedly re-created this stunning portrait of the ‘Statue of Liberty’ woman using the Artificial Intelligence software. Reporting the same, several websites published articles. They can be seen here and here.
The ‘Daily Mail’ news website published an article about the artworks of Bas Uterwijk. According to the article, Bas Uterwijk uses Artbreeder, a deep-learning software to create life-like images from scratch or based on different portraits. The same hyper-realistic portrait of the ‘Statue of Liberty’ was also published in the Bas Uterwijk official website and Instagram handle. They can be seen here and here.  Bas Uterwijk had created multiple realistic portraits of famous figures depicted in paints and sculpture.
The ‘Statue of Liberty’ sculpture was designed by the French sculptor, Frederic Auguste Bartholdi. According to the ‘Britannica’ website, the original model of the ‘Statue of Liberty’ statue was inspired by the figure of a female Egyptian peasant. Bartholdi reportedly produced a series of drawings of a gigantic female fellah, or Arab peasant, and gradually evolved it into a colossal goddess of Liberta, the subject of the Statue of Liberty.
To sum it up, a hyper-realistic digital portrait of the Statue of Liberty is falsely shared as the picture of the woman who posed for the ‘Statue of Liberty’ sculpture.