The serious love of fine old pictures which she had acquired as a girl, which made her the friend of such men as Bode and J.C.Robinson, is still demonstrated by the good Dutch, Flemish and Italian pictures at Friedrichshof. Excellent English portraits, including fine examples of Ramsay and Reynolds, hang near a range of good German family portraits which culminates in fine examples of Lauchert and Winterhalter (among them a full-length of the Crown Princess's grandmother painted at Frogmore in 1843) and a range of portraits by Von Angeli, including a likeness of Edward VII in German uniform and the moving full-length of 1894 of the Empress herself in mourning. Perhaps the most poignant things in her collection are the little pictures she had been given by her family in England: the enchanting little portrait of Princess Alice, painted for the Queen by Winterhalter in 1845 and given by Edward VII to the Empress at the very end of her life, or the little portrait of herself by the same artist, showing her, in 1856, in her first court dress, a picture given in the year it was painted to the Crown Prince to whom she had become engaged; some miniatures from her mother's collection; and the drawing of her by Landseer which had been made in preparation for portraits of her as a very small child.

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