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Title:
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Mourning Seraphim
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Artist: |
Baron Carlo Marochetti
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The Cawnpore (or Kanpur) Massacres occured during the Indian Mutiny of 1857/58. After news of the revolt of sepoys at Meerut and elsewhere reached Cawnpore an attempt was made to form an entrenchment around two barrack blocks. However, when four native regiments mutinied and accepted the leadership of Nana Sahib, the embittered heir of a local ruler, the British inhabitants were considerably outnumbered. Eventually the survivors were persuaded to come out of their entrenchment when Nana Sahib offered them the chance to leave the town in boats on the nearby Ganges. With some already in the boats, Nana Sahib's men opened fire on them and only a few were able to make their escape. Over 200 British women and children were then confined in the so-called Bebee Ghur, a house which had been built by a European for his indian mistress. Hearing that General Havelock's troops were approaching the town, on 15 July 1857, either Nana Sahib himself, or one of his subordinates, ordered that they should be killed. It is said that the sepoys refused to obey the order, but men were found who were prepared to carry it out. Some were shot, but many were hacked to death. The following morning a few who were still alive, as well as the bodies of many of the dead, were thrown down a well in the courtyard of the house by sweepers attempting to clear the scene. General Havelock's troops arrived and discovered the remains. Havelock himself left the town soon after to go to the relief of Lucknow, but Brigadier General James Neill stayed on to exact terrible reprisals on all suspected of involvement in these events. Subsequently the sum of £30,000 was raised from the town's inhabitants , which was used to create the memorial and its surrounding park.
Lord Canning, the first Viceroy of India, confided the task of commissioning a sculpture for the Cawnpore Memorial to his friend, George Leveson Gower, 2nd Earl Granville. As a kinsman of the Dukes of Devonshire and Sutherland, Granville was at home in a world of aristocratic sculpture patronage, but in this case the people he consulted were outside his immediate family: Lord Lansdowne, Lord Taunton, Lady Shelburne and Louisa Lady Waterford. On 10 July 1861, Granville informed Canning that he had written immediately to Marochetti to tell him of the Viceroy's wishes. The choice of Marochetti may have been due to a personal connection. Charlotte, Countess Canning, the Viceroy's wife, was the daughter of Baron Stuart de Rothesay, who had been British ambassador in Paris. She and her sister Louisa, who later married the Marquess of Waterford, had, as children, been playmates of Marochetti's wife, Camille (née de Maussion). Granville told Canning that he had asked Marochetti to provide a sketch, and offered to pay him for it if the design was not accepted. When he told Marochetti that he would be applying to other sculptors, Marochetti gave his reasons for objecting to competition. He appears however to have accepted the idea in this case, and even advised Granville to approach John Henry Foley, who he thought "clever in composition, and excellent in execution". Other British sculptors he pronounced to be "pitoyable".
Other sculptors who were considered were John Gibson and Sir Richard Westmacott, but the implication of Granville's comment on Gibson was that he was too persistent once he had got started on a statue. Westmacott had given up sculpture altogether. Foley refused to compete, though much flattered to be asked. Granville approached Thomas Woolner, who he described as "a young artist of great imagination and good workmanship. Woolner sent him, not a sketch but "a very pretty model; a woman leaning against a cross, a dead infant at her feet, a sword worked into the cross (an old English one, not very intelligible to a superficial observer)".
Though he had been asked for one sketch, Marochetti produced five. The one which Granville and his advisors preferred was "a new sort of Britannia: not a lady in a helmet ruling the waves, but a handsome pathetic woman with a wreath of cypresses on her head, clasping a large plain cross". Marochetti himself preferred a "St George in Armour". This Lady Shelburne pronounced "hideous". Lady Waterford thought it "beautiful", but to Granville it looked "too like a fiancé to Princess Marie's Jeanne d'Arc". This was a reference to a celebrated statue executed by the sculptor daughter of Louis Philippe. Apart from Marochetti, all agreed that the St George was not appropriate.
Marochetti admired the design which had been produced by Colonel Yule of the Bengal Engineers for the architectural screen surrounding the memorial. Granville felt a statue confronting visitors on their own level, before they made their descent into the interior, might not be suitable. The memorial precinct was open to the sky, and both Marochetti and Woolner felt that the statue should have some kind of canopy. Granville informed Canning that Marochetti would require three months to produce his model. The actual statue could be produced in a year after that. Granville then promised to send the model of the Britannia by an early post.
Canning wrote back to Granville from Calcutta on 17 June 1861, saying that he had been alarmed by a letter from Lady Waterford, in which she suggested for the memorial " a woman clinging to a cross with the bodies of murdered children near her". Canning explained that this sort of blunt reference to the horrors of the massacre was just what he hoped to avoid. It was likely to awaken dire memories in English families and the military, and he went on "nor do I think it desirable to put before the natives for all time to come so literal a picture of the horrors of 1857". He feared that his having said something at the outset about Rachel weeping for her children might have given the wrong impression. What he wanted was "something ethereal - ghostly; something in which the figures should not represent flesh and blood, but angels or guardian spirits", such as might suggest not "the first great agony of grief, but rather the after condition of sober mournfulness sustained and cheered by hopefulness". He went on to explain that the memorial was intended to mark the grave of Christian people rather than to recount the story of the massacre. All this was typical of his considered policy regarding the Indian Mutiny, of forgiving and forgetting, which earned him the nickname "Clemency Canning".
By July 21 Canning was beginning to worry about the delay with the monument. He hoped that the design with the murdered children had been abandoned. Although Lady Shelburne had written to him approvingly of Marochetti's Britannia design, he himself felt that the associations were wrong for a grave. "One's first thought" he told Granville, "is of the back of a halfpenny. However his only concern was that they should have "steered clear of the horrible".
Granville's last letter to Canning on this subject is dated 16 Jan. 1862. It explains how the final design was arrived at. Marochetti had been very dilatory about the commission, but he planned to have ready, before Canning's return to England, "a figure suggested by Lady Waterford, as the embodiment of what she has reason to believe was the intention of her sister, which she has gathered from several letters". Charlotte, Countess Canning, who had died of malaria in India on 18 Nov.1861,had clearly communicated her thoughts on the subject of a Cawnpore Memorial to her sister in the last years of her life. So it looks as though we owe the concept of the Mourning Seraphim to Countess Canning. However, Louisa Lady Waterford, who was quite an accomplished painter would have known how to give form to her conception. Marochetti's figure, which in its final form relates to a tradition of angelic images going back to the 1830s in his work, is clearly to some degree a collaborative effort.
The Seraphim was not completed until 1865, after Canning's death. It was erected, on the site of the well in the Bebee Ghur. The well itself was given a monumental rim, ornamented with abstract decorative motifs, and encircled by the inscription. This stood within Colonel Yule's gothic screen. It was clearly a much visited, and certainly much photographed memorial.
Mary Ann Steggles, in her book, Statues of the Raj, has recounted its fate in more recent times:
"Some defacing occured during the Independence celebrations of 1947 even though the local British community had been assured by the congress Party of the then United Provinces, that security would be provided. Afterwards, a local committee was formed to look into the question of what to do with the memorial, now an icon of British rule in India. They concluded that the figure, along with a number of gravestones, should be moved to All Souls' Memorial Church for safety. Expenses for the relocation were paid for by the State Government. The statue remains in the grounds of All Souls Memorial Church, Cawnpore (Kanpur)."
Sources:
Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice, Life of the 2nd Earl Granville,
2 vols, London, 1915.
Augustus Hare, The Story of Two Noble Lives. Charlotte
Countess Canning and Louisa Marchioness of Waterford, 3 vols, London, 1893.
Zoe Yalland, Traders and Nabobs. The British in Cawnpore
1765-1857 , Salisbury, 1987.
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Material(s): |
Marble
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Medium: |
Unassigned |
Finish: |
- |
Technique: |
Carved |
Genre: |
Commemorative monument
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Location: |
Cawnpore (Kanpur), All Souls' Memorial Church, , ,
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Colours: |
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Year: |
0 |
Height: |
0 metres |
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0 metres |
Depth: |
0 metres |
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Key: |
2033 |
Acc. No.: |
2033 |
Col. No.: |
2033 |
Number of views: |
2883 |
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