The Statue’s exterior was not painted in 1906, nor has it ever been. Despite several rehabilitations and restorations inside and out, and other threats of painting over or polishing off the patina, the Statue has been left its own, irreproducible color.

I made trips to the Statue to check it out in person. The first time, I took the ferry from lower Manhattan on a cloudy, drizzly day. As the boat got closer, the Statue loomed; there is nothing as tall anywhere around it, and when it came into full view it seemed almost to lunge out of the water. All the colors in its surroundings collaborated with the Statue’s own green: the bruise-blue of the clouds, the faded green of the leaves of the island’s London plane trees, the crayon green of the lawn, the forest-green seaweed on the rocks, the jade green of the waves.

When I went back a week later, I came by ferry from Liberty State Park, in New Jersey. This time, the sky was clear and the sun shone full on the Statue from directly overhead and its color blew me away. It kind of effervesced. I could not look at it enough. It did not resemble the swatch of Home Builders Green from New Palace Paint Supply that I had brought with me. I held the swatch up for comparison. The paint was shiny, tight, flat, while the ageless patina of the copper had a texture like extremely fine velour. Some of it shaded to a green-black, parts were dark blue, parts olive. Some of the green had evidently washed down onto the pedestal and stained the bas-relief granite shields once intended to hold the seals of the thirty-eight states (plus two extra for the future) that had entered the Union by 1886.

On the walkway that goes around the Statue I went clockwise and then counter-, to see how she looks from the south, the side immigrants saw first, with the right knee bent and the figure in stride. Then I stopped to view her from the front, the way the immigrants saw her as their ships passed by. From that angle she appears to be standing immobile. I did not leave until late in the afternoon, when the sun had moved lower in the sky. Now, as I watched from the ferry, light streamed around her. She was a giant silhouette with all of America behind her.

John Robbins, the historical architect who was a leader of the crew that restored the Statue between 1984 and 1986, and who now is in charge of construction, personnel, and security at the National Gallery, told me by phone that different degrees of patination cause the dark patches that people have noticed on her, especially on her face. Weather hammers her, too. “The wind up and down the Hudson River—down from Canada, up from the Atlantic Ocean—is quite severe,” he said. “The moist air has salt, and pollutants like acid rain and dissolved gases, and very tiny abrasives like the pieces of rubber from the tires of the city’s millions of cars. Not to mention the snow and hail and hurricanes. She’s an amazing artifact to have stood it all so well for so long.”

His team of restorers washed bird streaks and tar from the outside, removed bird’s nests from the base of the arm, replaced pieces of the nose, and redid the torch. Robbins said that the French artisans who made the torch were rumored to have saved buckets of their urine to patinate it, Gallic pee being thought the best for that task. If they did, it appeared to have had no effect, he added.

And what about the color? Why does it beguile us, and why did people become so devoted to it, early on, that they defended it from the Army’s customary practice of painting anything that doesn’t move?

“The object, all hundred and fifty feet of it, is handmade,” Robbins said. “The repoussé technique, hammering the copper on the molds that shaped it, was done by hand and square inch by square inch. Even in places nobody can see, the sculpture isn’t blank, it’s richly detailed—the strands of hair on the top of her head, the bun, the soles of her sandals. By her feet, the broken shackles, which are concealed from viewers on the ground, could be stand-alone works of art. The patina is an organic part of its handmade quality. Patina is a crystalline structure; it’s not opaque like paint. You’re looking into it. The copper, which is quite pure, is almost all still the original, after all this time. The patina has been growing for a hundred and thirty years.”

On September 29, 1909, Wilbur Wright took off from Governors Island in his canvas biplane, flew to the Statue of Liberty, and circled it while hundreds of thousands of spectators in boats and along the shore looked on. He then returned to Governors Island, after less than five minutes in the air. No American had ever flown in a plane over water before. The feat provided a highlight for the city’s Hudson-Fulton Celebration of 1909, which commemorated the three-hundredth anniversary of Henry Hudson’s landing on Manhattan Island and the hundredth anniversary of Robert Fulton’s first successful steamboat trial.

The Hudson-Fulton Celebration had a special flag, with orange, blue, and white horizontal stripes, and the letters “HF” in the middle. New York City itself lacked a colorful flag at the time. All it had was a plain white banner with the city’s seal in blue in the center. In 1915, the Art Commission associates of the City of New York created a new flag, also using orange, blue, and white. Like the designers of the Hudson-Fulton Celebration flag, the associates chose the colors because they were the flag of the Netherlands when the city was founded, in 1626. For a change, the associates arranged the stripes vertically rather than horizontally, with the blue closest to the flagpole, the white in the middle, and the orange next.

The flag the associates designed has now been flying over New York for a hundred and one years. Its orange, white, and blue became the city’s official visual signature. Sometimes the Empire State Building is lit up with these colors in honor of sporting events or anniversaries in local history. Orange, white, and blue are the colors of the New York baseball Mets and basketball Knicks, and of the hockey Islanders, in from the suburbs. The blue, which is almost indigo, makes the orange jump out at you, and vice versa, while the white assists them both. As colors go, these could not be louder, and in combination they shout.

The colors of the city flag imply history, politics, religion, and civic weal. The Statue of Liberty, by contrast, has a kinship with the color of money. Its outward and visible part almost is money, to the extent that pennies still have value today. The Statue is always described as the gift of the French people to the people of the United States, because the French raised the money to pay for the sculpture by their private donations, and their government was not involved. The American people eventually responded by raising money for the Statue’s pedestal. Joseph Pulitzer, the publisher of the New York World, led a fund-raising campaign in his newspaper, and it succeeded spectacularly, producing a hundred and two thousand dollars in donations between March and August of 1885. Pulitzer said that he would publish the name of every donor, no matter the amount donated. Names in small type, all jammed together, took up page after page in the paper. Sometimes the donations were only a few cents. The Statue owes its existence to French and American spare change.