Marochetti's bust of Edwin Landseer was his Royal Academy diploma work, presented after being exhibited there in 1867, the last year of his life. The diploma works were tokens of an artist's worthiness for election to full membership of the Academy. Marochetti was now a full member, but had been an Associate of the RA since 1861. The friendship between these two artists dated back to at least 1858, when Landseer had been given by Lord John Manners, First Commissioner for Works, the task of creating the four lions for the foot of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square. As a painter, he would have known that to produce such monumental works in bronze would require the assistance of a sculptor, and it was to be in Marochetti's studio off the Fulham Road, that the lions were not only modelled at full scale, but also cast. When there were aspersions in the press about the charge Marochetti was making for his assistance in this task, Landseer in 1863 protested, "could I have my choice for the final finish in metal I should without hesitation select and at once appoint Baron Marochetti, the man of Genius (and experience) best qualified to do justice to the completion of the Lions in Bronze". (Letter from Landseer to W.Cowper, 2 Aug.1863, The National Archive, Work 20-3/2) Landseer's admiration for Marochetti was reciprocated. When asked, in 1861, who he thought were the best contemporary British artists, he chose G.F. Watts and Landseer, but gave pride of place to Landseer, saying that Watts was heavily in debt to the Italian masters, whereas Landseer, "though his line is not the highest, .....has attained the highest rank in it, and because he owes so little to others". He added that "if neither Rubens, nor Paul Potter, nor Schnyders [sic] had lived, Landseer would probably have painted as he does", because "they have nothing so good as what is his own". (W. Nassau Senior, Conversations with Distinguished Persons During the Second Empire, London 1880, vol.I, p.323) In presenting the bust of Landseer as his diploma work, it looks as though Marochetti, at this time the recipient of some fairly vicious criticism, was keen to capitalize on his connection with a painter who had become something of a national institution. Indeed in 1866, he wrote to ask the Council of the RA, if they would accept "the temporary deposit of a Bronze statue of Victory, until the work he had in hand as his diploma is completed". ( Minutes of the RA Council, 19 Dec. 1866) The Victory in question would certainly have been the figure of victorious Britannia, seated on the back of a lion, which would in 1868, after the sculptor's death, be erected as part of the memorial to Colin Campbell, Lord Clyde, in Waterloo Place. When that memorial was inaugurated, the lion would prompt comparisons in the press with the Nelson lions, which it was known Marochetti had played a part in creating. When shown at the Royal Academy in 1867, a reporter for The Standard picked it out, along with Thomas Woolner's bust of John Henry Newman, for particular praise. In Marochetti's bust, this reporter wrote "the eyes are seeing (in Woolner's Newman the eyes are dead), and the work is one of great artistic interest". (The Standard, 3 June 1867) Marochetti was not above using photography to assist him with his portrait busts. In this case there is a strong resemblance to a portrait of Landseer taken by the photographers, J. and T. Watkins.
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