When Wilhelm Hensel was sent to London in 1843, he carried a letter from the King of Prussia who hoped he would be allowed to paint a portrait of his godson, the infant Prince of Wales. Hensel produced two versions of his portrait which, in the following year, was engraved with a dedication to the King. Queen Victoria was always fascinated by people, by quirks of personality and by good looks or the reverse. She was profoundly interested in how a countenance or a character developed. Her chief contribution to the Royal Collection was the formation of a vast array of portraits - in many media and on every scale, from the small miniature to the life-size full-length -- and of pictures of the great family events of which she was at the heart, from her Coronation in 1838 to the celebration of her Diamond Jubilee in 1897. She commissioned portraits all through her reign: to record those she loved, those to whom she was related and those who had served her. Many of these portraits, on their varying scales, were designed to form part of carefully planned displays, especially at Windsor Castle, Buckingham Palace and Osborne, and they would be related to the big paintings, many of them inevitably packed to the limit with identifiable likenesses, of family and national events. She was always anxious to receive portraits, from abroad, of her relations, in whose welfare and activities she kept an unflagging interest; she would arrange that those relations would receive copies of portraits painted m England. Above all she made sure that official, carefully considered, portraits of herself, and of members of her own immediate family, should be painted at regular intervals and that copies, or in some instances outstandingly fine engravings of them, were dispatched abroad. Not since the time of Charles I had a British Sovereign devoted so much attention -- and no British Sovereign was ever less arrogant or vain than Queen Victoria -- to the creation of a rich and carefully organized royal iconography. To her it was obviously essential that her family and her subjects, including of course those all over her vast Empire, should know what their Queen looked like. If she could not actually go to receive homage in her Dominions, she would ensure that tribute could at least be paid to an image of her and that her people should know what their Queen looked like.

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