拍品专文
The bronze statuette of enthroned Queen Victoria wearing the crown and bearing the sceptre carried at her 1837 coronation is a caste of the model executed around 1887 in the studio in Kensington Palace Gardens created by her daughter H.R.H. Princess Louise, later Duchess of Argyll (d.1939) under the guidance of the court sculptor Sir Joseph Edgar Boehm A.R.A. (d.1890). Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll, (1848-1939) was the sixth of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert's nine children and arguably the most gifted of a very artistic family. She was taught by the court sculptor Mary Thornycroft (d. 1895) and enrolled at the National Art Training School, Kensington, in 1868, but her duties as the Queen's social secretary prevented regular attendance. She went on to exhibit at the Royal Academy, the Society of Painters in Watercolour, and the Grosvenor Gallery. However much of her subsequent artistic progress came through her association with the Queen's sculptor Sir Joseph Edgar Boehm A.R.A, in whose studio she became friends with Alfred Gilbert. It is thought that she worked with Boehm and Gilbert to produce her best known sculpture, a lifesize marble statue of Queen Victoria, of which the present lot is a bronze reduction. The marble was commissioned by the Kensington Women's Jubilee Fund to commemorate the Queen's Golden Jubilee in 1887 and was unveiled in the Queen's presence in 1893 in Kensington Gardens, close to Princess Louise's apartments at Kensington Palace. The marble would have been scaled up from the original clay model by Princess Louise and it is conceivable that the present bronze, not numbering among a known edition, was either cast to assist in the 'scaling-up', as a maquette or as a memento for the Princess herself.