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Title:
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Tomb of Princess Elizabeth
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Artist: |
Baron Carlo Marochetti
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This small bronze is a 'souvenir' of the project initiated by
Queen Victoria, to raise a monument to Princess Elizabeth, a daughter of Charles I,
who died in captivity in Carisbrooke Castle on 8 Sept. 1650, at the age of
fourteen (see the entry on the memorial itself). This commemorative monument, a sort of retrospective
tomb, was erected in 1856, in the newly restored church of St Thomas in Newport
(Isle of Wight) the place of her interment, where, due to the troubled times in
which she was buried no conspicuous marker had been erected up till then. The
Queen, accompanied by Prince Albert, saw the monument newly installed there on
15 Dec. 1856. The Queen thought it "really beautiful, and left a
description of it in her journal for that day, concluding, "I rejoice to
think that I can pay a tardy tribute to her birth, youth, virtues and
misfortunes".
This is currently the only known bronze cast of this model, although there are two plaster versions in the Royal Collection, one in plain plaster (RC IN 2111) and the other in plaster, painted to resemble bronze (RC IN 2231). Both of the plasters must have been produced in the process of arriving at this statuette. An interesting glimpse into this process is provided by a newspaper report in the West
London Observer for 27 June 1857. This tells us of a dispute which was settled
in court, between Marochetti and the specialist in sculpture reduction, Charles
Delpech, whose name appears in the report as Delpeck. Written testimony was
produced on behalf of Marochetti by Benjamin Cheverton, the well-known inventor
of a machine for the reduction of sculptural models, and on behalf of the
defendant from a Mr Wyon (probably Leonard Charles Wyon, the medal engraver). Marochetti's
complaint was firstly that Delpech's reduction of his effigy of Princess Elizabeth was inaccurate, a view upheld by
both these experts, and that in response to his refusal to pay for a job badly
done Delpech had declined to return the model which had been given to him to
work from. It appears that Marochetti, despite the judgement having gone in his
favour, was obliged to compensate Delpech to some degree in order to get his
model back. Unless their differences were patched up, it seems likely that
Marochetti went elsewhere to get the job of reduction done more accurately. We are also uncertain as to where this bronze was cast. The job may have been done in his own foundry in Sydney Mews, South Kensington, but for small objects like this his custom seems to have been to go to other founders.
(for an
excellent general account of the Princess Elizabeth monument, see Caroline
Hedengren-Dillon, 'The Monument to Princess Elizabeth by Baron Carlo Marochetti
(1805-1867)', on The Victorian Web)
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Material(s): |
Bronze
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Medium: |
Unassigned |
Finish: |
- |
Technique: |
Cast |
Genre: |
Unassigned
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Location: |
Oxford, Ashmolean Museum , , Oxford, England
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Colours: |
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Year: |
1857 |
Height: |
0 metres |
Width: |
0 metres |
Depth: |
0 metres |
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Key: |
5141 |
Acc. No.: |
5141 |
Col. No.: |
5141 |
Number of views: |
2569 |
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