Joan of Arc, Maid of Orleans

The original statue was commissioned by the French government after the defeat of the country in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. The sculptor Emmanuel Frémiet took as his model Aimée Girod (1856–1937), a young woman from Domrémy, Joan of Arc's village in Lorraine. Inaugurated in 1874, the original copy is located at the Place des Pyramides, in Paris, near where Joan of Arc was wounded during her failed attempt to take Paris. The artist, who made another version of the monument for the city of Nancy in 1889, replaced the horse of the Parisian monument 10 years later by a copy of the smaller Nancy one, which earned him criticism. This version in Philadelphia is the third copy, and was commissioned by the city's French Community in 1890.