This marble portrait bust of Victor Emmanuele II by the sculptor Sir Joseph Edgar Boehm is a replica of a bust which Carlo Giovanni Battista Marochetti – known as Baron Marochetti – had made for the Hotel de Ville in Paris. Victor Emmanuele II is shown with his head turned to the left and dressed in military uniform with a fur cape over his shoulders, and with moustache and goatee beard. On his chest he wears the Star of the British Order of the Garter to which he was invested in 1855. Having trained in London and Vienna, Boehm worked in Paris for a period of three years before he finally settled in London in 1862. He received his first royal commission in 1869. Boehm’s Parisian training, as it had been the case for Marochetti after whom this bust was made, is said to have had a long-lasting influence in his work. Both artists drew from French realism and the emphasis on portraying and reflecting individual likeness. They adopted a style that contrasted with the idealised naturalism of the predominant neo-classical sculpture of the Victorian period. Victor Emmanuel II was King of Sardinia from 1849 and the first King of Italy after the unification in 1861. In 1853 at the outset of the Crimean War against Russia, he joined an alliance with France, Britain and the Ottoman Empire.