The Crimean War and Indian Insurrection
Fig. 180: Marochetti, Coldstream Guards; (Illustrated London News, 23 August 1856 © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans).
(Fig. 180) Following the Coldstream Guards memorial in 1856, Marochetti completed, in 1857, the year of the Cavalry memorial, a memorial commissioned by Queen Victoria for the church of St Thomas in Newport, near Osborne house on the Isle of Wight, to Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of Charles I. The Civil War was much on Marochetti’s mind (Fig. 181).
Fig. 181: Marochetti, Cavalry.
In 1857, whilst he was at work on the Cathedral Cavalry mural, Marochetti was finishing work on his more famous Crimean War Memorial for Scutari, whose expensive angelic iconography, at some £17000, he would again deploy on the Melbourne monument, as we have seen (Figs 182 and 183).
Figs 182 and 183: Marochetti, Melbournes; Scutari (Illustrated London News, 17 May 1856. © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans).
When it came to the Crimean angels, however, commentators suggested that Marochetti had overcharged, a “national injustice and national oversight” (Physick, 25).
In addition, around 1857, Marochetti produced busts of Prime Minister W.E. Gladstone; the Reverend William Sinclair for Leeds Philosophical Hall; Adam Smith for the Kirkcaldy Council Chamber, in Fife; Charles Philippe Henri de Noailles, duc de Mouchy; and of Henry Hallam for the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition, commemorated at Crypt in an 1862 statue by William Theed (Fig. 184).
Fig. 184: Theed, Hallam.
In 1858, Marochetti completed a white marble bust of Melbourne’s fellow Liberal Prime Minister John Russell (Fig. 185).
Fig. 185: Marochetti, Lord John Russell (courtesy of and © Jim Ebdon via Flickr).
1858 was also the year in which Marochetti was at work on a white marble bust of colonial secretary and imperial historian James Stephen (whose son, coincidentally, would marry another of Marochetti’s models around the same time: Julia née Jackson, the mother of Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf) (Fig. 186).
Fig. 186: Carlo Marochetti, Sir James Stephen, marble bust, 1858, NPG 1029 (© National Portrait Gallery, London; CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
At around the same moment, Marochetti received the hugely lucrative, £4,000 commission for a “very fine”, seated white–marble monument of Parsi Bombay opium and textile trader, and wealthy philanthropist, Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy, the first Indian man to be knighted, receiving a baronetcy in 1859 (Figs 187 and 188).
Figs 187 and 188: Unknown photographer, Sir Jamsetjee by Carlo Marochetti, (public domain); Marochetti, Jeejeebhoy (Illustrated London News, 25 September 1858.
© Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans).
Marochetti’s monument was based on a photograph and came complete with a portrait medal of the Queen, the marble ultimately destined for the Library of the Asiatic Society in Bombay, a bronze for the J.J. Institute. (Jeejeebhoy was also commemorated in the J.J. Hospital and J.J. Art School he founded in the city).
The monument, exhibiting “in an eminent degree those qualities unfortunately too rarely met with in modern portrait sculpture – character, dignity, and poetic purpose”, was designed to be a model of native generosity in the wake of the Insurrection (Barnes and Steggles, 209).
There is also a marble bust of Jeejeebhoy in Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, whose beautifully textured surface reveals Marochetti’s period passion for Indian textiles. Indeed, the Illustrated London News praised the “high order of finish” and drew attention to the statue’s “loose robes”, “rich fringe”, and “oriental headdress”, as well as the “Oriental devices” the sculptor carved into the back of Jeejeebhoy’s chair.
The sitter’s face, meanwhile, again according to the paper, exhibited a “mixture of Oriental gravity with the benignity and high intellectual purpose” of its “illustrious” sitter (September 25 1858) (Figs 189, 190, and 191).
Figs 189, 190, and 191: Marochetti, Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy, marble bust, Birmingham Museum collections. (details from photo by Elliott Brown via Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Nelson’s Column
Between 1858 and 1867, the same period that Marochetti was at work on the Melbourne monument, and again attracting controversy regarding their cost, at £11,000, Marochetti was responsible for casting, at his Onslow Square foundry, Landseer’s bronze lions for Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square (Figs 192 to 197).
Figs 192 and 193: John Ballantyne, Sir Edwin Landseer, oil on canvas, c. 1865, NPG 835 (© National Portrait Gallery, London; CC BY-NC-ND 3.0); Illustrated London News (11 October 1873, © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans).
Figs 194 and 195: Illustrated London News (2 February and 2 March 1867, © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans).
Figs 196 and 197: Woolner, Landseer.
Landseer’s lions obviously preoccupied Marochetti’s mind in this period, as his 1867 London monument to Lord Clyde indicates. The Illustrated London News speculated that the “naturalism in the marked recession of the facial line of the [lion], together with a looseness of texture left by the modelling tool”, indicated that it was “either actually a coarse sketch” by Landseer or imitative of his “least admirable characteristics as a sculptor” (September 7 1867) (Figs 198 and 199).
Figs 198 and 199: Marochetti, Monument to Colin Campbell, Field Marshal Lord Clyde, Illustrated London News,(18 January 1868, © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans); and detail showing Britannia and the lion (George P. Landow via Victorian Web).
The Early 1860s
Figs 200 and 201: Marochetti, Monument to the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers, Exeter Cathedral (© UKNIWM (WMR-25216); British Cavalry Division.
(Figs 200 and 201) In 1860, Marochetti’s Royal Lancers’ memorial was unveiled in Exeter Cathedral, a close relation of the St Paul’s Cavalry monument. In the same year, Marochetti’s standing memorial bronze to another Indian imperial ‘hero’, Robert Clive of India, was unveiled in Shrewsbury (Figs 202 and 203).
Figs 202 and 203: Marochetti, Clive (Elliott Brown via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0); and Illustrated London News (21 January 1860, © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans).
In 1861, Marochetti was elected an Associate Royal Academician, a member of the Institute of British Sculptors, and was made a Grand Officer of St Maurice and Lazarus (Fig. 204).
Fig. 204: Illustrated London News (23 February 1861,
© Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans).
In the same year, 1861, Marochetti completed a bust of Millais’ wife, Effie. Marochetti had already worked closely with Millais’ brother, on his bust of Gouramma of Coorg, as we have seen.
In the early 1860s, Marochetti frequently sat to photographers. Caldesi, Blandford and Company depicted him leaning upon a chair (Fig. 205).
Fig 205: Caldesi, Blandford & Co., Carlo Marochetti, albumen carte-de-visite, early 1860s, NPG x38984 (© National Portrait Gallery, London; CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
John and Charles Watkins, meanwhile, provided a bust portrait in the same lost right profile, evidently the sculptor’s favourite side (Fig. 206).
Fig 206: John & Charles Watkins, Carlo Marochetti, albumen carte-de-visite, 1860s, NPG Ax28937 (© National Portrait Gallery, London; CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Marochetti was, however, closest to Camille Silvy, who depicted him adjacent to a pair of sculptural statuettes and sold carte–de–visite of some of the sculptor’s greatest hits (Figs 207 and 208).
Figs 207 and 208: both Camille Silvy, Carlo Marochetti – albumen print, 28 March 1861, NPG Ax52145; and albumen carte-de-visite, 31 March 1861, NPG Ax11923 (both © National Portrait Gallery, London; CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
In addition, in 1861, Marochetti exhibited in Silvy’s studio a now lost coloured–marble statuette of Victoria as the Queen of Peace and Commerce.
At the 1862 International Exhibition in London could be seen Marochetti’s parianware busts of Albert and Victoria, by Minton and Company, as well as his bronze Albert, by Elkington and Company, works admired by Queen Victoria’s sculptor daughter, Princess Louise (Figs 209 and 210).
Figs 209 and 210: Marochetti and Minton, Albert and Victoria (Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons); and Elkington, Albert (Maidstone Museum & Bentlif Art Gallery, via ArtUK, CC BY-NC 4.0).
In the same year, 1862, Marochetti was hard at work on an effigy of the recently deceased Albert for Frogmore chapel in Windsor, ultimately completing a portrait of Victoria to lie beside him after her own death (Fig. 211).
Fig. 211: Marochetti, Tomb of Victoria and Albert (VCR Giulio19 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
Further Indian Insurrection Commissions
In 1863, Marochetti’s “very significant and characteristic” monument to the Sixteen Officers of the Bengal Royal Engineers who Fell in the Indian Insurrection was unveiled at St Paul’s, Calcutta, again, like the Melbourne, “in the form of a portal”, complete with a bronze relief of the Cashmere Gate (Figs 212 and 213).
Figs 212 and 213: Illustrated London News (1 August 1863. © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans).
On the lower left, the relief featured a scene of a corpse or injured soldier being laid upon or into the ground, recalling the scenography of John Bacon Junior’s John Moore in the London St Paul’s (Figs 214 and 215).
Figs 214 and 215: Marochetti, Royal Engineers, Illustrated London News (detail; 1 August 1863. © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans); Bacon, Moore.
Marochetti’s Bengal memorial had previously been on display at the South Kensington Museum, and, according to The Times, featured “bronze reliefs of the Cashmere gate and of other memorable localities, where many of the Bengal engineers won undying fame in the very moment when they ceased to live”.
In addition, the monument featured a series of portrait heads “remarkable for manly beauty”, a “striking type – clearly cut features, fine, broad, vigorous foreheads, and yet all, without exception, of delicate profiles”; excellent likenesses all. (Fig. 216)
Fig. 216: Marochetti, Royal Engineers, Illustrated London News (1 August 1863. © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans).
Marochetti’s photojournalist relief may, in turn, have inspired the similar relief of Delhi in Francis Derwent Wood’s 1896 Crypt memorial to Major General Sir John Eardley Wilmot Inglis (Figs 217 and 218).
Figs 217 and 218: Marochetti, Royal Engineers, Illustrated London News (detail; 1 August 1863. © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans); Derwent Wood, Smith Inglis.