page_title: Richard Coeur de Lion (statue)
section_title: Creation and display at the Great Exhibition
hierarchical_section_title: Richard Coeur de Lion (statue) / History / Creation and display at the Great Exhibition
caption_attribution_description: English: Colossal statue of Richard Coeur de Lion - western end of the Great Exhibition Building
context_page_description: Richard Coeur de Lion is a Grade II listed equestrian statue of the 12th-century English monarch Richard I, also known as Richard the Lionheart, who reigned from 1189–1199. It stands on a granite pedestal in Old Palace Yard outside the Palace of Westminster in London, facing south towards the entrance to the House of Lords. It was created by Baron Carlo Marochetti, an Italian sculptor whose works were popular with European royalty and the nobility, though often less well regarded by critics and the artistic establishment. The statue was first produced in clay and displayed at The Great Exhibition in 1851, where it was located outside the west entrance to the Crystal Palace. It was well received at the time and two years later Queen Victoria and Prince Albert headed a list of illustrious subscribers to a fund that aimed to raise money for the casting of the statue in bronze.
  Although the money was duly raised and the bronze cast of the statue was finally completed in 1856, a lengthy dispute delayed its installation for several years. The original idea had been to erect the statue as a memorial to the Great Exhibition.
context_section_description: Marochetti was born in Italy and was ennobled by the Kingdom of Sardinia but lived and worked in France, creating a number of prestigious works for the royalist French government in the 1830s. He made his name by creating equestrian statues; one, of the Duke of Wellington, was erected in Glasgow in 1840. By the 1840s, however, his popularity in continental Europe was in decline. The French Revolution of 1848, which saw the final overthrow of the French monarchy, prompted him to resettle in London and seek new patrons among the British elite.
  Marochetti was not popular with the Victorian artistic establishment; Punch referred to him derisively as "Count Marrowfatty", while John Timbs wrote that he "owed more of his success in life to royal and noble patrons than artistic merit." It was certainly true that he benefited from the patronage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. His courtly manners impressed Victoria on their first meeting in 1849, and soon afterwards he became involved with the Prince Consort's plans for what became The Great Exhibition of 1851. Several countries planned to display sculptures of romantic historical figures in their contributions to the exhibition. The genre was common in mainland Europe but relatively rare in England at the time. Marochetti was probably aware that the Belgian sculptor Eugene Simonis intended to show his statue of Godfrey de Bouillon, the leader of the First Crusade, which King Leopold I of Belgium had commissioned. The two men had a number of connections; they shared the same bronze founder, Soyer of Paris, and Simonis was influenced by Marochetti's earlier acclaimed statue of the Duke of Savoy, Emanuele Filiberto. The Italian sculptor was probably motivated by a sense of competition with the Belgian in designing his Richard I.
  Marochetti's creation of the clay model of the statue involved not only the sculptor himself but also the painter Victor Mottez, King Louis Philippe's personal physician Henri Gueneau de Mussy and the singers Mario and Garcia, all of whom contributed manual input. A clay model of the statue was displayed as one of two statues positioned outside the western entrance of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park. Unfortunately it was so poorly assembled that shortly after the opening of the exhibition on 1 May 1851, the horse's tail fell off. It was repaired and the statue eventually attracted critical acclaim. The art critic John Ruskin said of the model, "it will tend more to educate the public with respect to art than anything we have done for centuries". It came to be regarded as one of the more popular items in the exhibition and Prince Albert personally took King Leopold to see it and the statue by Simonis, which now stands in the Grand Place of Brussels. The Art Journal was later to describe it as "unquestionably a vigorous and spirited example of the bravura class of sculpture."
caption: The original clay statue on display in Hyde Park during The Great Exhibition (1851)
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