Richard Cobden, the advocate of free trade and peace campaigner, died on 2 April 1865. At the Royal Academy in the following year, Marochetti exhibited a marble bust of him (no.895 in the catalogue). It seems likely that, it being in marble, the sculptor had been commissioned to produce it for some specific purpose. It received a scathing review from the Pall Mall Gazette (16 May 1866, no.39, p.1577): "Baron Marochetti has succeeded in depriving the expressive countenance of Cobden of every trace of intellect and character; and posterity, if it believes the sculptor, will wonder that a man who looked more like a respectable Sussex publican than a great statesman, could have so influenced his own generation. Baron Marochetti is in truth a sculptor after the fashionable world's own heart, and he does in marble for courts and courtiers what Mr Thomas did in paint, when 'by command' he achieved 'The Queen and Prince Consort at Aldershot'". This was a reference to a painting by George Housman Thomas, exhibited at the same Royal Academy exhibition as the Cobden bust, and described in the catalogue as being "By command". This is now in the Royal Collection. It is a rather undistinguished nostalgic recollection of an occasion in 1859, when the Queen and the Prince had together reviewed the troops at Aldershot. In the Christie, Manson and Woods sale of Marochetti's studio contents, held on 7 May 1868, lot 105 was "Bust of the late W. Cobden - lifesize - on serpentine pedestal". In the annotated copy of the catalogue held at the National Art Library, the W. has been crossed out and R. written in by hand. It is also recorded in this copy that the bust was sold to Agnew for £23 and 2s. Its present whereabouts is unkown.
Since Marochetti's bust of him appears to have been posthumous, this may not throw any light on it, but at least we have some evidence of what Cobden thought about Marochetti, and the uses to which his work was being put. This is derived from the draft of a letter he wrote on 31 May 1853 to Lady Hatherton. In it, he advises her to read a paragraph in the Athenaeum, on the subject of the proposal to erect a bronze cast of Marochetti's equestrian statue of Richard Coeur de Lion in Hyde Park, as a memorial to the Great Exhibition. Both Lady Hatherton and her husband were keen to see the statue, the plaster model of which had stood outside the Western entrance to the Crystal Palace, erected in a permanent form. Cobden admitted that Marochetti had succeeded in creating a good equestrian statue, particularly with regard to the horse, whereas "all......modern bronze likenesses of that animal are spavined failures", and that, at the exhibition, he had, "all things considered,......made perhaps the most courageous effort of all contributors in England to vindicate our character for excellence in high arts". He nevertheless agreed with the Athenaeum commentator, in thinking that Richard was "not a fitting subject to be the Memorial of the Great Exhibition". He thought that "there still remains a good opening for our artistic triumph, in a suitable memorial...... in a group representing the peaceful contest of nations in the field of industry". (The Letters of Richard Cobden, vol.II, 1848-1853, ed. Anthony Howe, Oxford University Press, 2010, p.503)
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