(Photo: Royal Collection Trust/ © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020)

RC IN 2231

In the Royal Collection, there are two of these reductions of the effigial statue of Princess Elizabeth by Marochetti, one in plain plaster, the other in plaster painted to resemble bronze. They are reminders of the project initiated by Queen Victoria, to raise a monument to the Princess, 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 after describing it in her journal for that day, concluded, "I rejoice to think that I can pay a tardy tribute to her birth, youth, virtues and misfortunes".

These small, 'souvenir', versions of the statue must have been part of the process of reduction, towards the production of a bronze. There is currently only one known cast of a bronze, which is in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. In connection with this process, a newspaper report in the West London Observer for 27 June 1857, 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 the Princess Elizabeth statue 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.

(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)