Twins to Chennai's Munro statue

The Hindu

25-06-2025

As it always happens when I visit London, I go walkabout as Muthiah would say, getting happily lost and finding some gem or the other. This visit has been no different. One rather warm afternoon I set off to Leadenhall Street just to see the site where the East India Company HQ once stood. That building was demolished a long while ago, in the 19th century to be precise, and the history-loving English have been careful enough not to have a commemorative plaque. The building standing there is a Lloyd's Bank edifice, inaugurated sometime in the 1930s. Having seen it, I found myself near the Bank of England and looking up, saw an equestrian statue that took me back to the Island in Madras.
What I saw was the twin of our Thomas Munro statue, right down to the pedestal. From its base, even the rider looked similar. The inscription, however, said this was a statue of the Duke of Wellington, erected here in 1844. The sculptor was the same – Francis Chantrey – and this was one of three equestrian statues of his: Munro in Madras, the Duke in Threadneedle Street, and King George IV at Trafalgar Square, London. Interestingly, among all the statues that Chantrey sculpted, and he was a busy man, these were the only equestrian ones, as he was not comfortable doing animals.
What is even more interesting is that he probably used the same horse for all three statues, one sourced from the king's stables. Certainly, the king and Munro are mounted on horses modelled after the same animal. And yet, among the three, it was considered that the Munro horse was the worst, such being public perception! There were other similarities – all three riders have the same posture, and all three are without stirrups. This, in Madras, is often said to be an error on the part of the sculptor, on discovery of which he died by suicide. But sadly, for morbid Madras, this was not so. Chantrey intended all three to be that way, as tributes to the riding skills of the three men. And he died of a heart attack, at home.
Munro presented Chantrey more than enough challenges as it is. There was at that time only a portrait of the former Governor available. This, by Martin Shee, was 'half length to left', which meant the sculptor had to imagine how the rest of Munro's face looked. We know for a fact that many friends of Munro, as also his wife, were called in to testify that the final statue did look like him. Among those who came was the Duke of Wellington, soon to be the subject of Chantrey's third and last equestrian statue. His approval was clearly important.
Chantrey evidently took time over his statues. Munro, commissioned in 1828, took him 10 years and the king's, begun at roughly the same time, was completed in 1843. Wellington got his in 1844. But of the three, it was Munro's that was destined to travel the farthest. It was shipped in three pieces, Munro, horse, and granite pedestal, along with an apprentice, arriving in Madras in September 1838. The base had been prepared here by the firm of Ostheider's and on it, the statue's pedestal, once again near identical to the king's and later Wellington's, was mounted. The statue took a year to unveil, the event marked by a ceremony complete with a seventeen gun salute on October 28, 1839.
Francis Cunningham, the apprentice, stayed on, and became an administrator. Cunningham Road in Bengaluru is named after him.
(V. Sriram is a writer and historian)