“HRH Princess Louise” by Mary Thornycroft

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Bust of HRH Princess Louise (1848-1939)

W. T. Copeland & Sons, after Mary Thornycroft (1809-1895)

1871

Parian ware

Collection: Leighton House, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

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Photograph, text and formatting by Jacqueline Banerjee. Photograph taken by kind permission at Leighton House The background has been digitally removed.

Mary Thornycroft's first royal commission was in 1845, when she produced a sculpture of Princess Alice as Spring. Since then she had received many further commissions from the royal family, including some surprisingly intimate ones of the children's chubby little arms and feet (see Marsden 76-77). Shown above is a Parian Ware reproduction of one of her later works, produced by the Art Union. The original, which is in the royal collection, is in marble, and dates from the period when Princess Louise, by then a budding sculptor herself, was studying with her. The two had a good working relationship. They used adjacent rooms as teir studios when the royal family was in Windsor, and Pauline Rose says that there is "some evidence" of the two "working collaboratively, with Louise doing some modelling in clay which Thornycroft would then carve" (158).

Links to related material

Princess Louise posing as Plenty

Bibliography

Marsden, Jeremy, ed. Victoria and Albert: Art & Love. London: Royal Collection Publications, 2010 [Review]

Rose, Pauline. Working Against the Grain: Women Sculptors in Britain c. 1885-1950. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020 [Review]

Created 16 October 2022