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Rare marble portrait of scandal-plagued Victorian lady barred from leaving UK
UK’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport has placed a temporary export bar on a rare double portrait of Victorian sisters by Henri-Joseph François, Baron De Triqueti. The decision gives a UK institution until February 13, 2026, to acquire the piece for the recommended price of £280,000.
The Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest (RCEWA) recommended the bar because the double portrait is unique in Triqueti’s oeuvre and of “outstanding significance to the study of Triqueti’s sources, work practices, patronage networks, and the commissioning of medallion portraits by English families. It was also of outstanding significance to the study of the role of Victorian women and to development of estate management ideas.”
The son of a wealthy Piedmontese diplomat, Triqueti received a thorough classical education and had a deep knowledge of an appreciation for Greco-Roman and Renaissance art and architecture. Trained as a painter, he was an avid art collector and in his own work revived Classical and Renaissance techniques like chryselephantine sculpture, portrait medallions and colorful pictorial marble/stone inlay reinvented for modern tastes.
Triqueti began his career creating ornamental sculptures, and quickly rose to prominence receiving important commissions. He was 30 years old and had only been sculpting for four years when he was commissioned to make the monumental bronze doors of the Madeleine in Paris in 1834. The dramatic doors, four times taller than Lorenzo Ghiberti’s famed Doors of Paradise on the Florence Baptistery and twice the size of the doors of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome, earned him a position as a royal sculptor for King Louis-Philippe.
After the overthrow of the July Monarchy in the 1848 Revolution, Triqueti moved to England where he found new aristocratic patrons. His wife, Julia Forster, was the daughter of the chaplain to Henry Wellesley, 1st Earl Cowley, future British Ambassador in Paris. Cowley and his brother Gerald Wellesley, Dean of Windsor, commissioned several sculptures and bas reliefs and introduced his work to the highest echelons of society. Queen Victoria herself bought sculptures from Triqueti, gifting his ivory Sappho and Cupid to her beloved husband Prince Albert for his birthday in 1852. After his premature death in 1861, she commissioned Triqueti to design Prince Albert’s cenotaph and later the intricate inlaid marble wall panels and reliefs that adorned the Albert Memorial Chapel at Windsor Castle.
The double portrait of Florence and Alice Campbell was Triqueti’s version of an imago clipeata, a portrait on a round shield that in ancient Rome was used to depict images of honored ancestors, deities and famous people. They inspired the Renaissance tondo painting or sculpture. Triqueti’s innovation was to take the flat round medallion-like background of antiquity and transform it into a deep concave shape.
It is hoped that the acquisition of the work by a UK institution may allow further study, unlocking more insights into the artist’s methods and practices. Triqueti’s work also presents an enticing opportunity for the further study of Victorian women.
The sculpture’s focus are young sisters, Florence and Alice Campbell. It was commissioned by the girls’ father, Robert Tertius Campbell, an Australian businessman who is credited with introducing innovative agricultural techniques to his Oxfordshire estate, Buscot Park.
Robert Campbell was the son of merchant who made a fortune in gold and moved his large family to England in 1852. He poured money into climbing the social ladder, buying several country estates and city mansions and getting his kids lessons in the aristocratic pursuits. In 1857, he engaged a sculptor favored by Queen Victoria to make a portrait of two of his daughters.
One of the daughters in the portrait, Florence, started out following her father’s general plan with a big society wedding to a dashing British military officer in 1864 when she was 19. The marriage faltered out of the gate. Her husband was a chronically unfaithful abusive alcoholic and they finally separated seven years after their lavish wedding, over her father’s objections. He died a few weeks after their official separation from an alcohol-fueled episode of vomiting blood.
Her father would some come to yearn for something as simple as the separation he called “morally offensive.” Florence began an affair with the doctor they had sent her to in the attempt to “cure” her desire to divorce her husband. He was a quack to Victorian luminaries like Benjamin Disraeli and Florence Nightingale. She was 25; he was 62. And married. The death of her husband left her independently wealthy, so her father’s threats to cut her off fell on deaf ears, and she dove into the affair, to the point that she was caught having sex with him in the drawing room of her solicitor’s house, exposing herself to such venomous gossip that she was ostracized by society, her family and even shopkeepers who refused to supply such a scandalous household.
The affair finally ended after she had an abortion and almost died. Florence remarried to Charles Bravo, an age-appropriate barrister in 1875. This marriage too was an absolute disaster. He tried to control her money, isolate her from her friends, teamed up with his mother to stop her traveling, threatened suicide, hit her and insisted she get pregnant again right after a miscarriage. Five months after their wedding, he died in great abdominal pain. The post mortem found the cause of death was antimony poisoning.
Enter scandal number three. Now the gossip was about Florence having potentially poisoned her husband, and of course, all the past gossip about her separation from her first husband and her affair with the doctor old enough to be her grandfather came bubbling back up in the tabloids. She had to testify for three days at a second inquest, fielding questions about her past sex scandal. In the end, there was zero evidence she had anything to do with the poisoning, and a decent amount of evidence that her husband had done it to himself, but the stain was indelible and ruined her life. She sold her house, fled London, moved to a secluded place in the country where she became a virtual shut-in and drank herself to death at the age of 33.
The Charles Bravo case was such a huge scandal that it was still subject of conversation in three Agatha Christie stories a century after events, Ordeal by Innocence (1958), The Clocks (1963) and Elephants Can Remember (1972).
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