Left: Plaster maquette for the central figure of the Cawnpore Memorial in India. Right: The preliminary drawing. Thomas Woolner. Sketch for the Cawnpore Memorial in India, c.1861. Pen and brown ink over graphite on tan paper; 5 x 3 in. (12.5 X 7.5 cm) – sheet. The work was not executed. Source of model: Thomas Woolner, R. A.: Sculptor and Poet; source of drawing, private collection. [Click on both images to enlarge it.]
Commentary by Dennis T. Lanigan
The Cawnpore Memorial was erected to commemorate the seventy-three British women and 124 children killed in the Bibighar Massacre in Cawnpore, present day Kanpur, in India during the 1857 Indian Rebellion (Indian Mutiny). The victims were killed on 15 July 1857 and afterwards the dying and the dead were thrown down a well. The memorial was erected over the site of the well and was consecrated on 11 February 1863.
Charlotte, Countess Canning, the wife of the Governor General, and her sister, Louisa Anne Beresford, Marchioness of Waterford, were instrumental in arranging the memorial's erection and had much input into its design. Lord Granville initiated a project for sculptors to compete for the commission for a sculptural centrepiece for the memorial, but many leading sculptors including John Gibson, John Henry Foley, and Richard Westmacott declined the invitation. Thomas Woolner did compete, but his design was rejected as it was considered far too realistic a representation of what actually happened, as it featured an agonized and likely mortally wounded woman looking heavenwards, with the body of a dead child at her feet. The competition was won by Baron Carlo Marochetti, who was a favourite sculptor of Countess Canning and Lady Waterford as well as the Royal family. Count and Countess Canning paid for the sculpture.
The memorial as erected features an octagonal screen enclosure with gothic arches designed by Colonel Sir Henry Yule, which sits on a platform that encircles the well. At the front, facing the viewer, is an angel designed by Marochetti, with lowered eyes and looking down to the right, and holding two palms in her hands folded across her chest.
The story of the commission for the sculpture for the memorial is well outlined in letters to and from Lord Canning and Lord Granville. It would appear that Woolner's design was very much in keeping with the ideas of Lady Waterford but not those of Lord Canning. On June 17, 1861 Lord Canning wrote to Lord Granville:
I am rather alarmed by a letter from Lady Waterford in which, writing after she had seen you, she suggests as a design for the Cawnpore monument "a woman clinging to a cross with the bodies of murdered children near her." This is the sort of design I wished to avoid. It would be a very painful record to some English families, and a very exasperating one to our fellow-countrymen — soldiers for instance. Nor do I think it desirable to put before the natives for all time to come so literal a picture of the horrors of 1857. It was very much with the view of steering clear of anything of the sort that I asked for something ethereal — ghostly; something in which the figures should not represent flesh and blood, but angels or guardian spirits…. The crisis of murder and terror is not the moment to be perpetuated, nor is the first great agony of grief; but rather the after-condition of sober mournfulness sustained and cheered by hopefulness. I think that some such sentiment as this is the one which should prevail, not only for Indian reasons, but because the chief purpose of the monument is to mark the grave of Christian people. To convey the story of the massacre is quite a secondary object — if, indeed, it be an object at all. [qtd. in Fitzmaurice 296]
On July 10, 1861 Lord Granville replied in a letter to Lord Canning:
No time has been lost. I wrote in the first instance to Marochetti, telling him your wishes in detail, and I said that if this had been for myself, or in a private matter, I should have merely asked him whether he could undertake the commission. As it was, I begged him to send me a sketch, I paying him for it if rejected, and informing him that I should make a similar application to a limited number of sculptors, and decide chiefly according to the advice given me by the Lansdowne family, Lady Waterford, and Taunton. Marochetti implored me not to have recourse to competition, that it had always failed here and in other countries; that he did not mind competing if all parties were obliged to exhibit models of the full size…. I asked Woolner, a young artist of great imagination and good workmanship, to send a sketch. He has lately made a magnificent statue of Lord Bacon (not altogether a pathetic subject). In the meantime Marochetti had taken a journey, and only came back three days ago. Woolner instead of a sketch has made a very pretty model; a woman leaning against a cross, a dead infant at her feet, a sword worked into the cross (an old English one, not very intelligible to a superficial observer). [qtd. in Fitzmaurice 297]
It appears from the drawing that Woolner did indeed do a sketch of his idea for a memorial. Woolner's model for the intended monument is reproduced in Amy Woolner's book on her father, facing page 85. It is also reproduced in Benedict Read and Joanna Barnes book Pre-Raphaelite Sculpture on page 28. Woolner's initial sketch resembles his maquette for the sculpture fairly closely, although the woman's head is not quite so tilted, her arms and hands are handled slightly differently as is her drapery which hangs in a simpler fashion in the sketch. The pedestal in the sketch is also not as elaborate as the one in the maquette.
Related Material
- An Icon of Empire. The Angel at the Cawnpore Memorial
- Sketch for the Statue of the Cawnpore Angel, by Louisa Anne Beresford, Marchioness of Waterford
Scanned image and details of maquette by George P. Landow; scanned image and details of drawing by Lanigan. [You may use the images without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the photographer and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
Bibliography
"The Cawnpore Memorial." The Builder XXI (11 April 1863): 267.
Fitzmaurice, Lord Edmond: The Life of Granville George Leveson Gower, Second Earl Granville K. G. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1905. Vol. I: 396-97.
Read, Benedict and Joanna Barnes. Pre-Raphaelite Sculpture. London: Lund Humphries Publications, 1991, fig. 23. 28.
Woolner, Amy: Thomas Woolner, R. A.: Sculptor and Poet. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1917, facing p.85.
Last modified 14 January 2026