Marochetti had considerable involvement with lions on a
monumental scale in the last decade of his life, between 1859 and 1867. Pretty
much throughout this period the lions by Sir Edwin Landseer for the foot of
Nelson's Column were being modelled and cast in his premises in Sydney Mews,
and then Marochetti created a lion of his own for the group of Victory
Seated on a British Lion, which forms part of the monument to Colin
Campbell Lord Clyde, erected in 1867 in Waterloo Place, London.
This small model of a couchant lion however seems to have
been created some time before this. In 1857, the Italian sculptor Giovanni Duprè
came to London, to accompany his competition model for the monument to the Duke
of Wellington for St. Paul's Cathedral. During this visit he called on
Marochetti and showed him a photograph of his competition model. Marochetti
asked Duprè if he could keep the photograph, and asked him if there was
anything he could give him in exchange. Duprè tells the story in his Autobiography:
"When he saw the photograph of my model he desired to have it, and I was
delighted to give it to him. He wished me to choose something of his as a remembrance,
and I did not need to be urged. I had set my eyes on a most beautiful study of
a lion from life in dry clay, and so I asked him for that; but as that was a
thing precious to him, he asked me if I would not content myself with a cast of
it in bronze instead of the clay. On my answering that I would, he called his
caster, who worked for him in his own great foundry, and ordered it to be cast
at once. Two days after this I received it, and keep it as a dear remembrance
of an excellent friend, and as a valuable work of art" (G. Duprè, Thoughts
on Art and Autobiographical Memoirs, translated from the Italian by E.M.
Peruzzi, Edinburgh and London, 1884, p.283).
To a modern reader this may sound like a routine occurence,
but in 1857 it was not. For a sculptor at that time a sketch model was a means
to an end, and not something to be rendered permanent or exhibited. Over the
following decades, Impressionism in France and, in Italy the movement known as
Scapigliatura, gradually brought about a change in notions of artistic finish.
However, in France, up to the turn of the century, eminent sculptors like
Carpeaux and Dalou, who excelled in the
production of rough models, did not exploit these commercially during their
lifetime. Carpeaux's models were only cast from around 1910. In the case of Dalou, things happened rather earlier,
because his daughter Georgette had to pay for her care. In 1902, she signed a
contract with Susse, allowing a number of her father's sketch models for the Monument to Labour
to be cast in bronze for commercial exploitation.
The lion is just one of a small number of bronzes from
models by Marochetti which seem to anticipate the rather "modern"
preference for the unfinished. Other examples are the small model of the effigy
of Prince Albert, cast by Elkington, in the British Royal Collection, and the figure
of a Piedmontese Grenadier for the Monument to Carlo Alberto in Turin, which is
in a British Private Collection (see entries). The interest of the lion is that
we have Duprè's account of how this came about. It was a favour from one sculptor
to another, rather than a commercial undertaking, and, in this case, what was
probably a quite delicate operation was facilitated by the job being carried
out in house by Marochetti's own caster.
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