Oliver Millar

QUEEN VICTORIA AND PRINCE ALBERT: GERMAN PICTURES AND GERMAN PAINTERS

The royal residences which Queen Victoria knew as a girl, and which she inherited in 1837, were full of German pictures. There were, above all, portraits of members of the families whose blood flowed through the young Queen's veins, princes and princesses, Grand Dukes and Grand Duchesses, from Saxe-Gotha, Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Brandenburg-Ansbach, Prussia, Hanover and Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. When she took her relations or her grand visitors from abroad into the Waterloo Chamber at Windsor, they were confronted with Sir Thomas Lawrence's portraits of Prince Hardenberg, Baron von Humboldt and Count Münster and with the splendid full-lengths of Blücher and the King of Prussia himself Her Prussian royal portraits included, among other portraits of him, a version of the portrait of the future Frederick the Great as a little boy; and her uncle, George IV, owned portraits by Stroehling of the heroic Queen Louise of Prussia and of Blücher, and Stroehling's little picture of the death at Saalfeld of Prince Louis Ferdinand.

The Queen also inherited in 1837 a number of important German pictures: by Ulrich Apt, for example, Pencz, Lucas Cranach and, above all, Hans Holbein the younger; and it was these which were to give special pleasure to Prince Albert. His influence on the young Queen cannot be sufficiently stressed and nowhere was it more profound than in the development of her ideas on works of art and her attitudes towards the artists with whom she had dealings. The young Queen had an instinctive enthusiasm for pictures. She reacted with unbridled delight to the fine pictures she saw as a girl, in exhibitions or in the great houses which she visited with her mother. She was, however, haunted by memories of the extravagance of George IV and never felt free to indulge in the luxury of buying the kind of pictures which, like him, she so much admired.

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