It was, however, the Austrian Heinrich von Angeli who most successfully took on Winterhalter's role. Already very successful at the German, Austrian and Russian courts, he was recommended by the Crown Princess to her mother in the warmest terms; and in 1875 he finally arrived in England in March 1875. The tasks he was commissioned to carry out were exactly those that would have been expected of Winterhalter: a new likeness of the Queen, which could to some extent, despite its smaller scale, be used as a new official image (it was, for example, copied for display over the Viceregal throne at the Imperial Assemblage in Delhi in 1877); the portrait of Princess Beatrice needed for the octagonal three-quarter-lengths of the daughters in the Oak Room at Windsor; and, most important, the group of the family of the Prince of Wales. The last work was to take its place in the Dining-Room at Osborne opposite Winterhalter's group of 1846; and in 1876 Von Angeli painted for the Queen as a pendant to the Wales family picture the group portrait of the family of the Queen's second daughter, the Grand Duchess of Hesse: "the dear family picture", "wonderfully like & beautiful". Von Angeli's work possessed those qualities for which the Queen chiefly looked. They were fight in tone and admirable as likenesses. An English painter such as James Sant could not hope to compete with such success as Von Angeli so easily achieved; and when a group of the Edinburgh family was required, en suite with the Wales and Hesse groups, it was again entrusted to a German artist: the Düsseldorf painter, Carl Rudolph Sohn. Von Angeli's crowning triumph was to be charged with producing, in 1885, a new official portrait of the Queen. It was considered "exactly like"; and in it the Queen considered, as she wrote to her daughter, that the artist had "really outdone himself ... so like & so marvellously painted ... his Meisterstück". Finally, in 1899, he produced the last important -- and admirable -- portrait of the Queen, which she described to her daughter as the "best & likest he ever painted of me". Even at this late date there were regrets that the Queen had not sat to a good British artist, and a wish that she could be painted by Sargent: views expressed by those who thought Von Angeli's likenesses "no better than coloured photographs" or by those who, like George Moore, regretted the heavy, bourgeois Germanic quality he saw in so many of the pictures she had commissioned.

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