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A statue of Diana, Princess of
Wales, is located in the Sunken Garden of London's Kensington
Palace. Commissioned by Diana's two sons William and Harry on
the 20th anniversary of her death, the statue was designed and
executed by sculptor Ian Rank-Broadley and placed in the newly
redesigned garden by Pip Morrison before being unveiled as a
memorial to Diana on 1 July 2021, which would have been her 60th
birthday.
In 2017, Diana's two sons commissioned a statue of their mother
for Kensington Palace to commemorate the 20th anniversary of her
death. In an official statement released by Kensington Palace,
Prince William and Prince Harry said "Our mother touched so many
lives. We hope the statue will help all those who visit
Kensington Palace to reflect on her life and her legacy." The
money was raised through public donations, and a small committee
consisting of close friends and advisers, including Diana's
older sister, Lady Sarah McCorquodale, were said to be working
on the project. At the time, the BBC's royal correspondent Peter
Hunt wrote, "This national monument to the wife of one future
king and the mother of another has been a long time coming. The
Queen Mother statue was unveiled seven years after her death."
It was announced that Ian Rank-Broadley had been commissioned to
execute the statue of Diana. Its completion was initially
expected in 2019.
The statue was unveiled by William and Harry on 1 July 2021, on
what would have been Diana's 60th birthday, and shows her
surrounded by three children "who represent the universality and
generational impact of the Princess's work." It is situated in
the middle of one end of the Sunken Garden, newly redesigned by
Pip Morrison. Work on redesigning the garden began in 2019; five
gardeners planted over 4,000 individual flowers, including many
forget-me-nots, Diana's favourite flower, along with "ballerina
and blush noisette roses, white triumphator and china pink
tulips, lavender, dahlias, and sweet peas". A paving stone in
front of the statue features an extract from the poem The
Measure of a Man by Wallace Gallaher, previously used in the
memorial service to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Diana's
death in 2007.
In his review, the critic Jonathan Jones noted its "aesthetic
awfulness ... Flat, cautious realism softened by a vague attempt
to be intimate make this a spiritless and characterless hunk of
nonsense." Lily Waddell in the Evening Standard called it
"beautiful", and that it "captured the people's princess in
action and her kind heart".
Tristram Fane Saunders from The Daily Telegraph criticised the
choice of poem for the paving stone, stating that the extract
from "a poem that was already mediocre has been made worse" by
disrupting the rhythm and turning "To measure the worth/ Of a
man as a man" into "to measure the worth/ Of this woman as a
woman".
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