“Queen Victoria, Kolkata,” by Sir Thomas Brock

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Queen Victoria

Sir Thomas Brock, K.C.B., R.A. 1847-1922

Marble, lifesize, on a marble pedestal

Unveiled by the Prince of Wales 1921

Victoria Memorial Hall, Calcutta (Kolkata), India

In 1901 the British Government announced that an imperial memorial to the recently deceased Queen Victoria would be erected in London and invited contributions from all British dominions and colonies. Characteristically, the Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, decided that India should opt out and have its own Victoria Memorial in Calcutta, with the centrepiece a statue of the queen at the time of her accession. However, he did agree that the statue should be sculpted by Thomas Brock, who had been chosen as the sole sculptor of the Victoria Memorial in London. [Commentary continues below.]

Photograph taken, with thanks, from MIchael Janich's at Wikimedia Commons, where it is available under the Creative Commons license. It has been slightly modified. Click on it for a larger picture. text by John Sankey, and formatting by Jacqueline Banerjee. Mouse over the text for links.

Curzon left India in 1905 and it was not until 20 January 1914 that Brock was finally commissioned to execute a standing marble figure of Victoria in her Coronation robes. George V gave permission for Brock to base his portrait on the bust of the young queen” by Francis Chantrey in the Royal Collection and Brock said he hoped to complete the work in three years i.e.” by January 1917. This timetable was upset” by the 1914-18 War and it required special intervention” by Curzon to get the necessary block of Carrara marble from Italy.

In November 1919 Brock showed his work to V. J. Esch, the superintending architect of the Calcutta Memorial. Esch commented that the cheeks were too puffy, the foot too large and the wedding ring missing. Brock attended to these details and the statue was shipped to India in October 1920.

The Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII) opened the Victoria Memorial Hall on 2 December 1921. Reporting on the ceremony, the Daily Telegraph noted that the Memorial Hall's "greatest and most happily chosen ornament" was the marble statue of Victoria as a young and graceful woman. Even Lord Curzon, notoriously difficult to please, was satisfied; he wrote in 1925: "The exquisite white marble full-length statue of Queen Victoria, executed by the late Sir Thomas Brock RA, stands in solitary beauty under the dome." It stands there still, one of the principal tourist attractions of present-day Kolkota.

Related material

Bibliography

Lord Curzon, British Government in India: The Story of the Viceroys and Government Houses. London: Cassell, 1925.

Sankey, John. Thomas Brock and the Critics — An Examination of Brock's Place in the New Sculpture Movement. PhD Thesis, University of Leeds, 2002.

_____ (editor). Thomas Brock, Forgotten Sculptor of the Victoria Memorial, by Frederick Brock. Bloomington, IN.: Authorhouse, 2012.

Steggles, Mary Ann, and Richard Barnes. British Sculpture in India. Norwich: Frontier Publishing, 2011.

Last modified 26 January 2013