Lord Redesdale, for instance, thought that such a preference showed up the limitation of the Princess's mind, and Ruskin looked forward to the day when "the school of Mud -- in general -- Winterhalter and Modern German sentimental glass, is got rid of"; but no artist, in the long history of royal patronage in England, carried out more successfully or more patiently the tasks allotted to him. Certainly no portrait painter in England since the time of Winterhalter has produced such accomplished, convincing and sensitive portraits of -- or for -- his royal patrons. Nor must we overlook the younger brother, Hermann Winterhalter, who for many years loyally worked with his brother and also, in his own right, produced for the Queen a number of impressive, finely painted, pictures in his own right.

Shattered though she was by the death of the Prince, on 14 December 1861, the Queen did not allow herself to abandon the interest in art and artists which had played such a cherished part in their lives together or, above all, to neglect the regular commissioning of new portraits. She still did not turn, or only very seldom and usually with unhappy results, to English portrait painters. She turned above all for advice to her eldest daughter. For instance she instructed the Crown Princess in 1863 to see Albert Graefle, a successful portrait painter who had studied at the Munich Academy and was for many years associated with Winterhalter. He had produced earlier in the year distinguished, rather glittering, portraits, exactly in Winterhalter's manner, of the Princess and her husband for presentation to the Prince of Wales. In January 1864 he painted the portrait of the Queen in mourning, seated under a bust of the departed Prince and near a box of the official papers on which they had so often worked side by side. Graefle also produced for the Queen a series of smaller portraits, also much in the style of Winterhalter who had unfortunately become, in the Queen's eyes, "most provoking"; although in 1864 he painted for the Queen, as competently as ever, a pair of portraits of the Prince and Princess of Wales. It was the Crown Princess, again, who arranged that Richard Lauchert, who had also studied in Munich and whose work at various German courts had included portraits of the Prince Consort's elder brother and his wife, should paint the beautiful young Princess of Wales, first in a set of portraits, to hang at Windsor, of the Queen's daughters-in-law. Lauchert also initiated, with his portrait of the Crown Princess's eldest daughter, the series of portraits of the Queen's grandchildren, a series in which a number of German painters were to be employed.