![]() Each monarch has their own little pocket within it but Victoria and Albert were the first to make it more like – I don’t want to say a ‘museum’ – but it was certainly more organised under them.Īlbert regarded himself as a serious connoisseur and I think he felt he should be educating the public in art. The Royal Collection is very much a collection of collections. Obviously there was a collection there already, which she then added to, but they added their own layers and personality on top of that. They were also very concerned with how the collection was displayed and she spent quite a lot of time organising it and rationalising it. “Albert felt he should be educating the public in art” This love of art was one of the things they shared in common and you can see from Victoria’s journal how they often sat in the evening going through albums of watercolours together, arranging them, talking about them it was a mutual thing that they both really enjoyed. They also collected a lot of contemporary paintings, portraits of the family, albums of drawings and prints and went to a lot of exhibitions, especially the Royal Academy. Some of the things they collected were very personal and quite sentimental they would design jewellery and gifts for each other. Quite a number of those remain in Buckingham Palace today. When you see images of the interiors of the Victorian household you can see how many objects the Victorians liked to have out on display, and Victoria was the same.īracelet with miniatures of Victoria, Princess Royal, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, Princess Alice, Prince Alfred, Princess Helena and Princess Louise c.1845-50. Royal Collection Trust © HM Queen Elizabeth II 2018īoth Albert and Victoria were keen collectors who exchanged works of art as birthday and Christmas presents and they particularly loved sculpture, often giving each other amazing, full-length marble sculptures as birthday presents. ![]() Before that they lived at Windsor Castle where they all had little glass domes and most of them came with a little velvet cushion underneath – so they were on display and designed to be seen. All of Queen Victoria’s children survived, so again I think she commissioned them to try and capture something – some essence of their young lives.Īfter her death, the sculptures were all sent down to Osborne House. But because they’re white marble I think people sometimes think they are commemorative, funerary sculptures. Rather weirdly there is some evidence that Queen Victoria thought a cast looked rather like a dead limb, whereas marble captured an ‘alive’ moment. Obviously they connect in some way with the tradition that we still have today of making babies’ footprints and handprints, but these aren’t even plaster casts, they’re marble sculptures. We don’t know if that is perhaps because of taste’s connection with teeth or whether it was an aesthetic choice with fuchsias being the best shape that the tooth fitted with.īut as well as these highly personal pieces of jewellery, we have Victoria’s sculptures of her children’s limbs. It’s not so well documented in Queen Victoria’s journals but we think she chose fuchsias because they’re associated with ‘taste’ in the Victorian language of flowers. She made jewellery like this for a number of her children, Beatrice was the youngest and she kept three of her teeth and had them made into the little set of fuchsias. “Queen Victoria thought a cast looked rather like a dead limb, whereas marble captured an ‘alive’ moment” You can see that the enamel is a bit worn, suggesting that Queen Victoria did wear it, but we don’t know the specific occasion. Their eldest child, Princess Victoria, lost a baby tooth when they were on holiday in Scotland so it was made into a brooch in the shape of a thistle – with the tooth representing the seedhead that you get at the top. Mary Thornycroft (1809-95), Left arm and hand of Princess Louise 1848 in its display case. Royal Collection Trust © HM Queen Elizabeth II 2018
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