Please look at this text … According to his own account, Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi, the sculptor of the Statue of Liberty,modeled the face of the statue after that of his mother and the body after that of his wife.
I don’t like the above because of the red marker. …is not after that = expired ?
I’d love this way …
***According to his own account, Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi, the sculptor of the Statue of Liberty, modeled the face of the statue like his mother and the body like his wife
The original sentence is correct. The idiom “after that” does not mean “expired”. It is common to refer to something as “being patterned after” something. In this case, the face of the Statue of Liberty is patterned after his mother’s face, and the body is patterned after his wife’s body.
I am glad he did it that way, because patterning the statue’s body after his mother’s body would have just been creepy!
If you write it the way you want, then the sentence implies that he would have modeled the face of the statue the way his mother would have modeled it, if she was the sculptor.
“Bartholdi modeled the face of the statue after the face of his mother and the body of the statue after the body of his wife.”
“Modeled after” is a common verb/preposition pairing. “That” is a pronoun that’s used so the author doesn’t have to awkwardly repeat “face” and “body”.
It’s comprehensible, but not strictly correct. It sounds like you’re referring to “a statue like his mother”, which isn’t what the sentence is trying to say.
You could say “Bartholdi modeled the face of the statue to be like the face of his mother and the body of the statue to be like the body of his wife.” But that’s more wordy than the original.
If you’re not a native English speaker, you probably shouldn’t be trying to improve on something written by a native speaker unless you’ve spent years learning all the little quirks of the language. Chances are your logical assessment of what’s right and what’s wrong will go astray because you’re unfamiliar with some minor detail of usage.
I know this is GQ but I would like to share this MPSIMS tidbit. In my shop I have a few of the tools used by Kenneth Lynch in the 20’s to restore the Statue of Liberty.
I don’t think he’s saying it means expired. I think he’s saying it is expired, as in archaic. That’s not true either, of course, though it’s more common in British English.
I think what most people are trying to say is that we would say:
According to his own account, Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi, the sculptor of the Statue of Liberty, modeled the face of the statue after his mother and the body after his wife.
Except that it’s a little clearer, though probably not necessary, to say he modeled the face of the statue after his mother**'s face** (not just after his mother, in general)—which is what “modeled the face of the statue after that [i.e. the face] of his mother” means.
According to his own account, Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi, the sculptor of the Statue of Liberty, modeled the face of the statue after his mother’s, and the body after his wife’s.
According to his own account, Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi, the sculptor of the Statue of Liberty, based the face of the statue on his mother and based the statue’s body on that of his wife.
Or ‘inspired by’:
According to Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi, sculptor of the Statue of Liberty, the statue’s face was inspired by that of his mother and the body by that of his wife.
(The torch came from his brother Jean Michel “Bunny” Bartholdi, the well known Parisian flamer.)
Or, the writer could have said “The sculptor himself said he used his wife as the model for the body of the statue, but chose his mother as the model for the face.”
