Nor was it only for portraits that the Queen turned to German
painters. Of course no one in her eyes, could surpass Edwin Landseer
in the painting of animals, but she commissioned a large number
of small pictures of favourite dogs, parakeets, ponies, horses
and prize-winning cattle and pigs from Friedrich Wilhelm Keyl,
who had studied in the Staedelsches Institut and in Brussels and
later worked closely in London with Winterhalter. Thoroughly
competent, and usually highly finished, his pictures have none
of Landseer's flair. For visual records -- in oils -- of the
places she loved best the Queen employed a number of minor painters.
The most prolific and highly favoured -- he was also very inexpensive
-- was August Becker, brother of the Prince Consort's Librarian.
He had studied at Düsseldorf and painted mountain scenery
in the Tyrol, Switzerland and the Bavarian Alps. In 1854 the
Prince, who loved mountains, had bought at the German Gallery
in London Becker's large and striking view of the Jungfrau. It
hung thereafter at Osborne, with mountain views by such painters
as Leonhard Rausch, Oswald Achenbach, Maximilian Haushofer and
Ernst Kaiserrand with most of Becker's lively little views of
the Scottish Highlands which are said to have reminded the Prince
of Thuringia. Many other special spots were recorded for the
Queen by Becker: the terrace at Osborne, Schloss Waldleiningen,
Heidelberg, Melibokus and the Bergstrasse and the Villa Hohenlohe
which the Queen had taken over after the death of her half-sister.
In January 1866 the Crown Princess wrote to the Queen that Becker
had painted for her "3 pictures of dear Balmoral ... very
pretty -- and welcome to us as Souvenirs"; and it was her
collection, and the works of art she had collected with the Crown
Prince, which perhaps illustrate in microcosm the theme of the
artistic links built up in the Victorian period between the English
and the Prussian courts. Schloss Friedrichshof -- the house and
the collections it contained (and partly still contains) -- is
a conscious memorial to the ardent efforts of a noble lady to
merge for the benefit of her adopted country the best artistic
and intellectual achievements of her husband's Fatherland and
of her own home, to which she remained so passionately attached.
In the books she read and the works of art she collected she
was touchingly loyal to the memory of her father; and it was the
great tragedy of the modern age that the ideals which she had
inherited from him and shared with her husband
were forgotten or swept aside.
