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Title:
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Prince Arthur
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Artist: |
Baron Carlo Marochetti
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(Photo:
Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020)
RC IN 2076
Prince
Arthur was born on 1 May 1850, and was said to be Queen Victoria's favourite
son. His birthday was the same as that of the Duke of Wellington, and in later
life he was to fulfil the promise of Marochetti's statue of him by rising to
the rank of Field Marshal. He was named after the Duke, who, at his christening,
stood godfather to him. The Duke died on 14 Sept. 1852, and Jonathan Marsden has
plausibly suggested that the inclusion of an ornamental sword, almost as high
as the child himself, was to indicate that Prince Arthur would be heir to the
valour and leadership qualities of his godparent, and live up to his name. The
statue was commissioned by Prince Albert, as a present to the Queen on her
birthday on the 24 May 1853, but at that point only the plaster model had been
completed. The following year the Queen recorded the arrival of the marble, in
her journal for 18 August 1854: "Marochetti's statue in marble of dear
little Arthur has arrived & is
beautiful. We are placing it near the staircase leading up to the girls &
boys rooms". This was in the ground floor corridor at Osborne House, which
was filled with antique and modern statuary. Jonathan Marsden has also
suggested that, in this context, it would have recalled statues of Christ
holding the cross. Possibly the recollection was not of a Christ, but of an
infant St John the Baptist Holding the Cross by Luigi Bienaimé of 1836, of
which there is a full length version in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, and
of which there is an excerpt of the head alone in the Royal Collection (RC
IN41024). In producing such 'fancy'
portraits of the Royal children, Marochetti was rivalling the British sculptor,
Mary Thornycroft, who, in 1846, had completed a series of life-size figures of
four of Arthur's siblings, as personifications of the Seasons. Reproductions of
the statue were produced in Parian Ware, bronze and alabaster. Ten years later, Marochetti would revisit this theme of a boy with martial attributes, in his never completed statue of Lionel Henry Lutyens, where the allusion is to the antique statue known as the Ludovisi Mars. (see entry) (see J. Marsden, Victoria and Albert: Art and Love, Royal Collection Publications, London, 2010, cat. no,37, p.91)
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Material(s): |
Marble
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Medium: |
Unassigned |
Finish: |
- |
Technique: |
Carved |
Genre: |
Portrait Statue (Standing)
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Location: |
London, Buckingham Palace, , ,
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Colours: |
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Year: |
1853 |
Height: |
1.9 metres |
Width: |
0 metres |
Depth: |
0 metres |
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Key: |
5839 |
Acc. No.: |
5839 |
Col. No.: |
5839 |
Number of views: |
4630 |
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