![]() ![]() ![]() On his birthday in 1857, Albert was presented with a statue of Lady Godiva, modelled in sensuous silver, gold and enamel. At Osborne House, the family’s home on the Isle of Wight, the queen commissioned Scottish artist William Dyce to paint the fresco Neptune Resigning to Britannia the Empire of the Sea, a scene which contains a mass of nude bodies – male and female – about which Dyce recorded that the prince consort was shocked. The artist William Edward Frost was renowned for painting nudes, and the queen and Prince Albert bought several of his works. Victoria noted in her journal “Albert was enchanted by it – so much so that he made me buy it”.ĭespite presiding over an age when it was considered shocking for a woman to show so much as an ankle in public, the queen was happy for her family to live surrounded by nude statues and paintings of frolicking naked nymphs. Cimabue’s Celebrated Madonna, painted when Leighton was living in Rome, was exhibited at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1855. In the 1850s, the young Frederic, Lord Leighton knew his career was assured when his first major sale was to the queen. The queen also loved the works of the Pre-Raphaelite rebel turned society-portrait painter John Everett Millais (1829-1896), whose portrait of her adored Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli was ordered to be garlanded with black mourning when Disraeli died. At Christmas 1841, the queen gave Prince Albert a painting by Edwin Landseer of the prince’s favourite greyhound, Eos, and Landseer was regularly engaged to paint royal pets from then on. ![]() Over a decade after his death, the queen wrote fondly about the painting in her journal as “my darling Albert’s favourite picture”.Īlthough Victoria often favoured artists from her mother’s and her husband’s native Germany, most notably Winterhalter, they also commissioned British artists. The painting was commissioned by the queen as a present for her husband’s 24th birthday, in 1843. (And of course we all know how Albert helped introduce the German tradition of the Christmas tree into British life.) They loved to surprise each other with a ‘secret’ present, such as the surprisingly sexy painting of the young Victoria, with tendrils of hair tumbling over bare shoulders, by German artist, Franz Winterhalter (1805-73). They gave – and expected – gifts at every wedding anniversary, birthday and Christmas celebration, usually of works of art. Gift-giving as we know it now took its form under Victoria and Albert too. When Prince Albert gave Queen Victoria an engagement ring – an item little known in Britain in the first half of the 19th Century – he began a new fashion that has endured ever since. In addition to paintings and sculpture, the couple also commissioned love tokens from jewellers and helped boost that industry. Many of the traditions we take for granted today, and the artistic legacies we celebrate, emerged from Victoria and Albert’s marriage.īoth the queen and her consort were accomplished artists, as well as great collectors. This overwhelming love shared by a queen and her prince would change British culture forever. ![]() The British were so used to royal marriages being business contracts that a genuinely romantic royal love match was keenly observed. The media made much of the fact that the queen’s fiancé was of her own choosing and that she, being of a higher rank, had proposed. So when Victoria fell in love with Ernst’s younger brother, Albert, the public was enthralled. Queen Victoria’s mother and the government had expected her to marry her cousin Prince Ernst, eldest son of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. But when the country found itself with a young queen after so many dissolute Hanoverian kings, it seemed that exciting new era was dawning. Few had foreseen that this little-known princess would become their monarch. When Queen Victoria inherited the British throne just a few weeks after her 18th birthday, there was immediate speculation about who she would marry. ![]()
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