Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy (1783-1859) was a Parsee businessman, who made a fortune dealing in opium and textiles with the Chinese. He had been a noteworthy benefactor to his native city, Bombay, his charitable enterprises including a hospital, an art-school, the causeway between Bombay and Salsette, and a dam at Poonah, for the provision of water to the city. These benefactions earned him a knighthood in 1842, and he was to become the first Indian baronet of the United Kingdom on 6 August 1857. On his retirement in July 1856, a public meeting was held, presided over by the Governor of Bombay, Lord Elphinstone, which voted the erection of a statue (Times, 30 July 1856). By the 15 August that same summer, the Times was able to announce that there was a prospect of the subscription reaching £5,000, and that the work had been offered to Marochetti. The report also mentioned the various images, including "photographs taken from different points of view", which might assist the sculptor in his task. The completion of the statue was announced by the Illustrated London News, in its issue of 25 Sept. 1858 (pp.279-280), and the marble version which is in the Old Town Hall at Bombay is dated 1858. Although the Illustrated London News reporter mistook the destination of the statue, writing that it was bound for Calcutta, the article referred to discussions in the Indian newspapers as to the appropriat site for it. Both from the point of view of its material, marble, and its seated posture, the reporter believed that an indoor site, such as the one which had eventually been chosen, in the Town Hall, was preferable to an outdoor one. Despite the confusion over the city, the article referred, perfectly accurately, to the town hallfor which it was destined as "the chief building appropriated to our commerce in the East", and to the statue's prospective position, next to a statue of Sir John Malcolm, and facing one of Sir John Forbes (this should have been Sir Charles Forbes). These statues are the work of Sir Francis Chantrey, and both are in Bombay's Old Town Hall. The commission for the statue preceded the ourtbreak of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, and its instatement, following the conclusion of the uprising, made it an example and an incentive for the involvement in local affairs of the native citizens, which was encouraged as part of the reconciliation initiative. Sir Jamsetjee is represented wearing native costume, including the characteristic Parsee hat, called a Phenta, and with a portrait medallion of Queen Victoria pinned to his chest. He is seated in a relaxed but symmetrical attude, hands clasped on his knees, in an elaborate seat, whose high back, carved with plant motifs, forms a background to his head and upper body. A bronze statuette following this model was shown at the Royal Academy in 1859, and a full size version at the London International exhibition of 1862. At the latter venue, the statue won high praise from the critic J. Beavington Atkinson, writing in the Art Journal (1 Nov. 1862, pp.213-214). Rather surprisingly at this date, Atkinson claimed that it was "comparable to work from the vigorous hand of Velasquez", and he specified that "the treatment is broad and generalised; essentials are seized, minor details sunk into subordination, and the result is character, command, and power maintained in dignity of repose". For the Athenaeum's critic, although he found it "difficult to deny a palm to Baron Marochetti" for his statue, "so excellent are its simplicity and picturesque character", he deplored this very picturesqueness, as being "popular and temporary rather than sound and high in motive" (Athenaeum, no.1808, 21 June 1862, p.825). The bronze shown at the 1862 exhibition is probably the one now situated in the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy Hospital in Bombay. Another full-size bronze cast was in the sculptor's studio at the time of his death in 1867. It then formed part of a group of Marochetti sculptures loaned by his widow to the South Kensington Museum. With the waning of Marochetti's reputation in the later years of the nineteenth century, these sculptures came to be seen as surplus to requirement. In 1910, the statue of Jeejeebhoy actually stood in the roadway outside the museum, and it was suggested by a member of the museum staff that it might have "considerable value as scrap metal". Clearly it was subsequently taken indoors, the museum's director, Eric Maclagan, declaring that "during the last thirty years he [Jeejeebhoy] has been shunted about from pillar to post in various back premises of the museum, and he is now in the vaults". In Jan. 1934, it was reported that the then baron Marochetti, who had been contacted, had acknowledged that the statue was "a white elephant", and had shown himself disposed to seeing it "broken up and sold as waste metal". However, on 31 July 1934, George Marochetti was able to announce to the museum that he had presented the statue to the city of Bombay, through the present Sir Byramjee Jeejeebhoy Bart., and he requested that the museum ship it out. The statue seems then to have been erected overlooking Bombay's Vir Nariman Road, where it still stands. (Much of the material in this paragraph is taken from the folder dedicated to the Marochetti loan, held by the Victoria and Albert Museum's Sculpture Department)
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