This figure is believed to be Marochetti's personification of Turkey. It is a heavily bearded male figure, wearing a turban, and a flowing jacket or kaftan over baggy trousers. It is now in very poor and battered condition, and, at the time this photograph was taken, sported a choice selection of obscene graffiti. Marochetti was one of a number of sculptors commissioned by the Crystal Palace Company to create colossal personifications of countries and cities, to decorate the upper terrace, overlooking the gardens of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham. After Paxton's palace had served its original purpose of housing the Great Exhibition of 1851, in Hyde Park, it was dismantled, and re-erected, between 1852 and 1854, with significant modifications, at Sydenham. Here it became a universal museum and pleasure garden. The intention of the Crystal Palace Company was to create a "Palace of the People". Sculpture, consisting mainly of plaster casts and models of historical and contemporary work, was a major feature of the interior, but the terrace sculptures and some of those surrounding the ponds in the lower gardens, were remarkable for having been site-specific works. It is probable that the rather international cast of sculptors, who were commissioned to produce these statues, was the choice of the expatriate Italian sculptor, Raffaelle Monti, who, in the early years, was in charge of sculpture in the palace. Amongst them were the Frenchman, Antoine Etex, the German, von der Launitz, the Belgian, Geefs, and the American, Hiram Powers. Monti himself sculpted four of the figures, and Marochetti, of whose work he was known to be an admirer, was commissioned to produce figures of Egypt, Turkey, Greece and India. This figure, supposed to represent Turkey, is the only one to have remained on the terrace until now. Marochetti's Egypt is now at Faringdon Park, Berkshire, but both Greece and India have disappeared apparently without trace. The materials in which this series of statues were executed remain a bit of a mystery. It is known, for example, that the four figures sculpted by John Bell were cast in Blashfield's weather-resistant terracotta, but other sculptures in the gardens were in various types of composition material, including cement.
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