Height: 41cm (16in) x 38cm (14.75in)
Bronze equestrian group of the Field Marshal and Prime Minster (1769-1852) mounted on his favourite battle horse Copenhagen (1808-1836); the duke dressed in long coat, boots and cocked hat, a telescope in his right hand. The underside of Copenhagen inscribed ‘COMTE D'ORSAY SCULPT. 1848’; the whole mounted on an integral rectangular naturalistic base.
The present model was created by the artist and ‘oracle of fashion’ Alfred Guillaume Gabriel, Comte d’Orsay (1801-1852) whom the Iron Duke held in surprisingly high regard. D’Orsay was known to wider society as a dandy and the paramour of the Countess of Blessington with whom he lived at Gore House, Kensington (later demolished to make way for the Royal Albert Hall). D’Orsay and Blessington were as scornful of economy as they were of bourgeois morality, and it was to meet his debts that D’Orsay turned to portraiture. For willing subjects he needed to look no further than those who flocked to Lady Blessington’s door between 1836 and 1848. They included Prince Louis Napoleon (afterward Napoleon III), the then-dandyish novelist and future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and former Tory Prime Minister the Duke of Wellington.
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In 1845 he executed two portraits of the Duke; an oil on canvas NPG 405 and the equestrian model from which the present bronze derives. From this latter model a large silver-gilt version for Apsley House was produced by Hunt & Roskell. The cast bronze edition of 1848 evidently equally pleased both the subject and the artist. Indeed Wellington presented one casting to his daughter-in-law on Waterloo Day 1852, while in March 1845, D’Orsay told the diplomat Henry Bulwer, ‘I have just made a statuette of the Duke of Wellington on horseback ... The Duke declares it is the finest thing he has ever seen and the only portrait by which he would wish to be known to posterity.’
Comte d'Orsay (1801-1852) was the son of one of Napoleon’s generals and an illegitimate daughter of the King of Wurtemburg. Despite strong Bonapartist tendencies, he took a commission in the French army in 1821, and attended the lavish coronation of George IV as an officer in the suite of Louis XVIII. While in England he mastered the language, met Lord Byron and, it is said, sowed the seeds of his ménage a trois with the Lord and Lady Blessington. The following year he accompanied the Blessingtons to Italy and renewed his acquaintance with Byron at Genoa, who, by all accounts, was greatly amused by d’Orsay’s domestic arrangements.
In 1827 d'Orsay further complicated his private life by marrying Blessington’s fifteen year-old daughter by a previous wife. A legal separation followed in 1838, but d’Orsay benefitted from a pay out of £100,000 to his creditors in exchange for relinquishing any future claim on the Blessington estate. After Lord Blessington’s death in 1829, d’Orsay and Lady B. returned to England to take up residence at Gore House, but by 1849 their extravagance resulted in bankruptcy. D’Orsay left for Paris, followed by Lady Blessington who died shortly afterwards. He endeavoured to provide for himself by painting portraits. Napoleon III wished to assist but was reluctant to entrust d'Orsay with affairs of state. Instead he offered him the position of director of the Beaux-Arts. However within a few months of the announcement D'Orsay died at the house of his sister Ida, Duchesse de Gramont, at Chambourcy.
References:
Kjellberg, P. (1987) Les Bronzes du XIX Siecle, Les Editions de L'Amateur, Paris.
Wellesley, C. (2014) Wellington Portrayed, Unicorn Press
Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (1769-1852) Field-Marshal & Prime Minister