George V by Charles Sargeant Jagger, 1885-1934. 1914. Marble, 18 feet high, on a pedestal 43 ½ feet high. Now located at Coronation Park, Old Delhi, India. According to Mary Ann Steggles, Statues of the Raj, this monument was “a gift of the Maharaja of Kapurthala and a few unspecified princes. The commission came to Jagger's studio in 1933/34. The pedestal and surround for the figure were designed by Edwin Lutyens, in consultation with Jagger. The massive figure was exhibited as a model in both 1933 and 1935 at the Royal Academy. It was originally erected under a canopy forming the King George V Memorial in the Prince's Park, New Delhi, adjacent to the War Memorial Arch” (200).
Ann Compton gives slightly different dimensions for the statue and pedestal: statue 20'; pedestal 40'. She tells us that the king is depicted as wearing the robes that he wore for the Delhi Durbar of 1911, and also reminds us that the full-scale model was unfinished at the time of Jagger's death. It only took three weeks for his assistant to complete it, under his friend Sir William Reid Dick's supervision, so it must have been nearly finished. But Peter Induni (c.1883-1943) worked on the top part from the smaller model, and Compton suggests that this, together with Reid Dick's and and Lutyens' involvement, "suggests a loss of Jagger's individual style in the finished work" (131). [Click on thumbnails for larger images.]
Text and photographs: Robert Freidus and Simon Stock, with material added from Ann Compton's book by Jacqueline Banerjee. [You may use these images without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the photographers and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite it in a print one.]
Related Material
Bibliography
Compton, Ann. The Sculpture of Charles Sargeant Jagger. Much Hadham, Herts: The Henry Moore Foundation; Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2004.
"Peter Induni." Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland 1851-1951. University of Glasgow History of Art and HATII, online database 2011. Web. 4 June 2017.
Steggles, Mary Ann. Statues of the Raj. Putney, London: BACSA [British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia], 2000.
Last modified 4 June 2017