Richard Coeur de Lion is a Grade II listed equestrian statue of the 12th-century English monarch Richard I, also known as Richard the Lionheart, who reigned from 1189 to 1199. It stands on a granite pedestal in Old Palace Yard outside the Palace of Westminster in London, facing south towards the entrance to the House of Lords. It was created by Baron Carlo Marochetti, an Italian sculptor whose works were popular with European royalty and the nobility, though often less well regarded by critics and the artistic establishment. The statue was first produced in clay and displayed at The Great Exhibition in 1851, where it was located outside the west entrance to the Crystal Palace. It was well received at the time and two years later Queen Victoria and Prince Albert headed a list of illustrious subscribers to a fund that aimed to raise money for the casting of the statue in bronze.

Although the money was duly raised and the bronze cast of the statue was finally completed in 1856, a lengthy dispute delayed its installation for several years. The original idea had been to erect the statue as a memorial to the Great Exhibition. This prompted opposition, as did proposals to place it outside Charles Barry's newly completed Palace of Westminster. Various other locations to display the statue were initially considered before agreement was reached that it would be placed in Old Palace Yard, Marochetti's preferred location. It was installed in October 1860, though it was not until March 1867 that it was finally completed with the addition of bronze bas-reliefs on either side of the pedestal.

The quality of the statue's workmanship caused problems during its first half-century; the horse's tail fell off the day after it was installed at the Great Exhibition, and forty years after its installation it was discovered to be riddled with holes and to have never been properly attached to its pedestal. It narrowly escaped destruction during the Second World War when a German bomb dropped during the Blitz landed a few metres away and peppered it with shrapnel. The pedestal and the horse's tail were damaged and Richard's sword was bent by the blast. In 2009, the Parliamentary authorities undertook a project to conserve and restore the statue.

Description The statue was created by Baron Carlo Marochetti and is located in Old Palace Yard outside the Palace of Westminster, opposite Westminster Abbey in London. With its pedestal, it stands high, showing King Richard I on horseback. The king is depicted wearing a crowned helmet and a chainmail shirt with a surcoat, and lifting a sword into the air. The horse paws the ground, as if preparing for a charge into battle. Marochetti described his work as being inspired by Richard I rather than accurately depicting a 12th-century knight.

It stands on a granite pedestal also designed by Marochetti and made by Freeman & Co. of Penryn, Cornwall. Bas-relief panels showing Crusaders fighting the Saracens at the Battle of Ascalon and Richard on his deathbed pardoning Bertran de Gourdon, the archer who fatally shot him in 1199, were added to the east and west sides of the pedestal in 1866–67. As the statue cannot be accessed by the general public – the area around it is used as the House of Lords car park – the west-side scene showing Richard and Bertran is the only one visible from the street. According to Marochetti, the two bas-reliefs were designed in the style of Lorenzo Ghiberti's doors at the Florence Baptistry. Bronze letters on the front of the pedestal bear the inscription RICHARD I CŒUR DE LION / 1189–1199.

The great majority of the art in and around the Houses of Parliament is of British origin, due to a policy of acquiring British art for the building. Marochetti's statue thus represents one of the few examples of a non-British artist's work being selected for the Parliamentary estate.

History

Creation and display at the Great Exhibition

Marochetti was born in Italy and was ennobled by the Kingdom of Sardinia but lived and worked in France, creating a number of prestigious works for the royalist French government in the 1830s. He made his name by creating equestrian statues; one, of the Duke of Wellington, was erected in Glasgow in 1840. By the 1840s, however, his popularity in continental Europe was in decline. The French Revolution of 1848, which saw the final overthrow of the French monarchy, prompted him to resettle in London and seek new patrons among the British elite.

Marochetti was not popular with the Victorian artistic establishment; Punch referred to him derisively as "Count Marrowfatty", while John Timbs wrote that he "owed more of his success in life to royal and noble patrons than artistic merit." It was certainly true that he benefited from the patronage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. His courtly manners impressed Victoria on their first meeting in 1849, and soon afterwards he became involved with the Prince Consort's plans for what became the Great Exhibition of 1851. Several countries planned to display sculptures of romantic historical figures in their contributions to the exhibition. The genre was common in mainland Europe but relatively rare in England at the time. Marochetti was probably aware that the Belgian sculptor Eugène Simonis intended to show his statue of Godfrey of Bouillon, the leader of the First Crusade, which King Leopold I of Belgium had commissioned. The two men had a number of connections; they shared the same bronze founder, Soyer of Paris, and Simonis was influenced by Marochetti's earlier acclaimed statue of the Duke of Savoy, Emanuele Filiberto. The Italian sculptor was probably motivated by a sense of competition with the Belgian in designing his Richard I.

Marochetti's creation of the clay model of the statue involved not only the sculptor himself but also the painter Victor Mottez, King Louis Philippe's personal physician Henri Gueneau de Mussy and the singers Mario and Garcia, all of whom contributed manual input. A clay model of the statue was displayed as one of two statues positioned outside the western entrance of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park. Unfortunately it was so poorly assembled that shortly after the opening of the exhibition on 1 May 1851, the horse's tail fell off. It was repaired and the statue eventually attracted critical acclaim. The art critic John Ruskin said of the model, "it will tend more to educate the public with respect to art than anything we have done for centuries". It came to be regarded as one of the more popular items in the exhibition and Prince Albert personally took King Leopold to see it and the statue by Simonis, which now stands in the Grand-Place of Brussels. The Art Journal was later to describe it as "unquestionably a vigorous and spirited example of the bravura class of sculpture."

Casting and dispute over location

Major General Charles Richard Fox proposed during the exhibition that a bronze cast should be made of the statue to serve as a memorial to the exhibition, marking one end of the site of the Crystal Palace with a statue of Prince Albert at the other end. A campaign got underway two years later, in May 1853, with a variety of the great and the good signing a brochure promoting a scheme to erect the statue somewhere in London. Its supporters included the Duke of Sutherland, Lord Lansdowne, the Earl of Shaftesbury, the sculptor John Henry Foley, the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, the ceramic manufacturer William Taylor Copeland and the Conservative MP (and future Prime Minister) Benjamin Disraeli. The Times was strongly in favour of the project due to the influence of its foreign affairs reporter Henry Reeve, who had known Marochetti since as early as 1839. The Royal Family also let it be known that they were supporters, with Queen Victoria donating £200 and Prince Albert £100.

The future location of the statue was a contentious issue from the outset, with Fox's proposal of a site in Hyde Park being sidelined in favour of leaving the site open for future consideration. The appropriateness of its theme in relation to the Great Exhibition was also questioned. The Art Journal pointed out the contradiction between "the effigy of a valiant crusader" and "the great Peace congress of 1851" and asked why "a foreign sculptor alone" was being selected to commemorate a British exhibition. The Lord Mayor of London, Thomas Challis, was similarly critical, declaring that the statue depicted "muscular power and the almost savage ferocity of war ..., while ... the Great Exhibition afforded an example of the cordial amity of nations." His criticism was perhaps not unrelated to the fact that he was promoting a rival scheme to commemorate the Exhibition. Others criticised the statue's lack of realism. As The Times observed after the statue's installation, the sculptor "sacrificed probabilities in the close fit he has given to Richard's mail shirt, which is made to display the swelling biceps and folded mass of pectoral muscle as accurately as a knitted woollen jersey."

Despite the criticism, £5,000 (equivalent to £ today) was raised by private donations for a bronze version to be created. Parliament subsequently agreed to contribute £1,650 for the pedestal and a further £1,500 for two bas-reliefs to be installed on its sides. In 1854 a plaster version was placed in New Palace Yard facing west outside Westminster Hall, but Charles Barry, the architect of the palace, was opposed to its placement there. The Art Journal criticised the New Palace Yard location on the grounds that the statue was merely a novelty and, worse, depicted an unworthy subject – "a disobedient son and a bad governor". It also suffered from being lost against the architectural details of the Palace of Westminster. By early May 1854, the plaster statue had been removed.

In 1856, Marochetti had the statue cast in bronze at the workshop that he had established in the early 1850s in Sydney Mews, off Fulham Road. The casting and the statue's gifting to the nation in the summer of 1856 made the question of its location all the more essential to resolve. Other sites were considered, including outside Buckingham Palace, Carlton Gardens near the Horse Guards and even on top of Marble Arch. Prince Albert himself suggested locating it outside the west entrance of Westminster Abbey, looking down the newly created Victoria Street. Punch mocked the ongoing search for a location in an August 1857 issue, calling Richard I "the Wandering Statue of London". The anonymous writer asked whether "no-one [will] find standing-room for this fugitive king? Is there no spot, no royal mews, no academic stable where his over-driven steed can be taken in to bait?"

Marochetti proposed to install it in Old Palace Yard outside the south window of Westminster Hall. His idea was considered by the Fine Arts Commission for the Palace of Westminster and was deemed acceptable, although Sir Charles Barry again opposed it. His reasoning was that Old Palace Yard was "too limited in area, and too irregular and unsymmetrical in its form and approaches, to give due effect to it, as a work of art ..." For his part, Marochetti positively preferred the location's irregularity to the symmetry of a formally laid-out square. The dispute continued until 1859 when the Commissioner of Works, Lord John Manners, finally agreed to install the statue in Marochetti's favoured location. By this time Sir Charles Barry was seriously ill (and died on 12 May 1860) so was no longer in a position to offer opposition.

Installation and subsequent history