Baron Pietro Carlo Giovanni Battista Marochetti (14 January 1805 – 29 December 1867) was an Italian-born French sculptor who worked in France, Italy and Britain. He completed many public sculptures, often in a neo-classical style, plus reliefs, memorials and large equestrian monuments in bronze and marble. In 1848, Marochetti settled in England, where he received commissions from Queen Victoria. Marochetti received great recognition during his lifetime, being made a baron in Italy and was awarded the Legion of Honour by the French government.

Biography

Early life

Carlo Marochetti was born in Turin, where his father, Vincenzo, a former priest, was a local government official and professor of eloquence at Turin University, but after the family moved to Paris, Carlo was brought up as a French citizen. He studied at the Lycée Napoléon and then studied sculpture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris where his teachers were François Joseph Bosio and Antoine-Jean Gros. At the Paris Salon in 1827 he exhibited a marble statue of A Young Girl playing with a Dog which won a silver medal. Between 1822 and 1830 Marochetti frequently spent long periods in Rome where his mother was resident and where he collaborated with François-Joseph Duret and Antoine Étex and worked briefly at the studio of the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen. He delayed completing the altar group to create a monumental equestrian statue of Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy which he donated to the city of Turin. He lived on Onslow Square, and maintained a large studio and his own foundry in the adjacent Sydney Mews. In his studio, Marochetti created an equestrian statue, in plaster, of Richard Coeur de Lion which was displayed at the Great Exhibition during 1851. His equestrian statues included those of Viscount Combermere in Chester and Sir Mark Cubbon in Bangalore and for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in Glasgow. In the 1860s he championed a scheme for a set of statues celebrating British engineers to be erected in the churchyard of St Margaret's, Westminster. The scheme was rejected but three of the statues, of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Robert Stephenson and Joseph Locke were erected separately elsewhere. He also created the marble recumbent effigies for the tomb of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore in Windsor Great Park. However the first version was rejected by the architect of the monument, Sir George Gilbert Scott, and Marochetti died before a satisfactory second version could be completed. He was elected an associate of the Royal Academy 1861 and a full academician in 1866.

1840-1849

1850-1859

1860 and later

Other works

  • Seated statue in marble of Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy, 1857, in the Asiatic Society Library, Mumbai Town Hall. Two versions in bronze of the same design, at the entrance to the JJ Institute and on Narriman Road, are also known.
  • East Devonshire Regiment Crimean War memorial, Exeter Cathedral
  • Memorial plaque, with portrait medallion, to Prince Albert, Sts Thomas Minster, Newport, Isle of Wight
  • Monument to Princess Elizabeth, 1635–1650, Sts Thomas Minster, Newport, Isle of Wight, 1856
  • Statue of St Michael, Parish Church of Champmotteux, Essonne
  • Statue of General Henri Gatien Bertrand, 1773–1844, at Châteauroux, Indre, France
  • Bronze bust of John Charles Robinson from 1864-65 in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London