Our Lives in Watercolour 26 April – 3 October 2021
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THE QUEEN'S GALLERY PALACE OF HOLYROODHOUSE Victoria and Albert: Our Lives in Watercolour 26 April – 3 October 2021 Plain English Script Family and Home 1 FRANZ XAVER WINTERHALTER Queen Victoria, 1855; Prince Albert, 1855 RCIN 913344; 913345 Welcome to The Queen’s Gallery at the Palace of Holyroodhouse and to this exhibition: Victoria and Albert: Our Lives in Watercolour. It is full of beautiful detailed paintings made with watercolours. They were commissioned and collected by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and they bring to life the excitement and variety of the 20 years of their marriage. Nowadays watercolours are often associated with landscape painting. Victoria and Albert thought that they could be used for other subjects as well as landscapes, such as the appearance of a room, or the spectacle of a state visit. They could also be used to make accurate portraits – just like these two, painted by Franz Xaver Winterhalter when Victoria and Albert were both in their mid-thirties. Art was one of the royal couple’s great shared passions. They spent many evenings looking at pictures together. From their childhood and through their adult lives, both of them jumped on opportunities to draw and paint. This made them very good at commissioning and collecting art. They understood how to put a painting together and how to work with colours and had a detailed understanding of the watercolours they were collecting and commissioning. They would sometimes suggests changes if they thought they would improve the work. In this exhibition the watercolours are organised by theme. They show different sides of Victoria and Albert’s lives – as young parents and also as public figures. These were times of big change in British society, in some of which they were personally involved. The watercolours have been put in frames for this exhibition, but originally most of them were mounted in a series of albums that Victoria and Albert called ‘View Albums’. These albums were some of their most treasured possessions. As you make your way through this exhibition, we hope you will get a feeling of what it was like for the royal couple to sit together, looking through the pages of these albums, remembering together important people, places and occasions. Before you go up the stairs to the main galleries, be sure to watch the short film showing how the beautiful facsimile of one of Victoria and Albert’s original View Albums – displayed here – was made by the Royal Bindery especially for this exhibition. 2 JAMES ROBERTS Queen Victoria’s Christmas tree at Windsor Castle, 1850 RCIN 919812 It is Christmas Eve 1850 in Windsor Castle. Outside, the air is ‘raw and damp’ but in the warmth of the castle excitement is growing as Victoria, Albert, their children and the Queen’s mother, the Duchess of Kent, prepare to exchange Christmas presents. It was the German tradition to do this on Christmas Eve. Lighting dozens of tiny candles on several Christmas trees was a signal that the time was drawing near. Later Victoria wrote in her diary: ‘my beloved Albert first took me to my tree and table, covered by such numberless gifts, really too much, too magnificent. I am delighted with the really splendid picture in water colours by Corbould.’ In this watercolour, by James Roberts, Corbould’s painting is on the easel on the right-hand side and a picture of it is below: Other presents were arranged on the Christmas tree table, including vases and bronze statues. Amongst the smaller items at the front, there may have been a bracelet designed specially by Albert as a gift for Victoria, which she also mentioned in her diary. Throughout their marriage Victoria and Albert often gave each other artworks as gifts. They would commission or buy works for one another to give at Christmas or on birthdays or other special occasions. Roberts was one of a number of artists who painted inside views of the various places where Victoria and Albert lived. These paintings show how they were decorated in the 19th century. Sometimes there are no people included in the paintings but their personal belongings – sheet music on a piano, a book on a table, or a shawl draped on a chair – make the rooms feel like a home, just as they appeared to Victoria and Albert. They may have lived in palaces but they were also homes and places where they lived their family life. On Christmas Eve 1850, with seven children around, that was very lively. Queen Victoria wrote: ‘The Boys could think of nothing but the swords we had given them and Bertie of some armour which, however, he complained, pinched him!’ On other evenings at Windsor, Victoria and Albert would often spend time together in The Print Room, arranging and enjoying the miniatures, drawings and watercolours she had inherited. The Print Room at Windsor Castle Albert was very keen on organising things, sorting them out and arranging them in order. It was something he did all his life. He furnished the Print Room at Windsor with cabinets which he designed himself. Victoria records in her diary that they would often go to the Print Room after dinner at Windsor. The room is called the Print Room but prints are just a part of the collection. The most important items there are drawings and watercolours: they are original works rather than copies as prints often are. These include the Old Master drawings – works by Leonardo, Holbein, Canaletto, Michelangelo and others. They are some of the greatest works of art in the world and some of most prized pieces in the Royal Collection. Albert and Victoria had little interest in collecting Old Master drawings, but they were very keen to arrange this fantastic collection. When they started to collect watercolours, Albert and Victoria arranged them in date order in the series of nine View Albums. After Victoria died it seemed only natural that these albums should be placed in the Print Room alongside all the wonderful works they had organised together 50 or 60 years before. 3 SIR WILLIAM ROSS (1794–1860) Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, and Prince Alfred, dated 1847 RCIN 913818 Here six-year-old Bertie – later King Edward the Seventh – turns to his three-year-old brother, Prince Alfred as he leads him by the hand. Painting portraits of children is not easy. But this artist, the celebrated painter of miniatures, Sir William Ross, was used to coping with fidgeting and wriggling by younger members of the royal family. Like many of Victoria and Albert’s favourite artists he received regular commissions from them. His first painting of the royal children was of the boys’ older sister Vicky, the Princess Royal, in her cradle, when she was less than a month old. Artists like Ross got to know their subjects very well as they painted them at several stages in their lives so that the sitter and the artist became close to each other. When Ross died Vicky wrote, in a letter to her mother the Queen, that she would always remember Ross as a ‘good, kind, simple-hearted old man’. In this portrait the young Princes are wearing Highland dress (Royal Stuart tartan) but Ross painted them at Windsor Castle, not in Scotland. The outfits suggest to us that their parents loved Scotland, where they had celebrated Albert’s birthday a few months before. Bertie, dressed like he is here, had recited a poem by Sir Walter Scott to his Papa. Victoria and Albert were so delighted with this portrait of their young sons that they gave prints of it as Christmas presents to members of the royal household. This was a very public sign of their admiration for Ross’s talents. 4 JAMES ROBERTS (c.1800–67) The Marble Corridor, Osborne House, dated 1852 RCIN 923463 In the early years after she became queen and then when she got married, Victoria enjoyed holidays in Brighton on the south coast of England. Her uncle, George the Fourth had made Brighton very fashionable. As a wife and mother, she longed for time with her family away from the eyes of the public. The Prime Minister Robert Peel suggested to Albert that he visit Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. Albert was immediately impressed by its sheltered woodland location, private sandy beaches, high position and peaceful views across the river Solent. We can just see the river through the arched doorway in this watercolour by James Roberts. The house, however, was too small, so plans for a new, bigger house were drawn up. Albert had input into the design of the new house, which was in an Italian Renaissance style, with clean lines and cool marble. It brought a little piece of the Mediterranean to England. The family spent their holidays there in the spring and the summer for the rest of their marriage. In this watercolour of the inside of the new Osborne House we see the Marble Corridor which linked the formal State rooms and the household wing where the royal family’s bedrooms, sitting, dining and billiard rooms were. Roberts’ watercolour gives a detailed record of its appearance – from the Minton floor tiles to the arrangement of sculptures, which are still in the Royal Collection today. The three children making their way down the corridor are probably Princess Alice, Prince Alfred and Princess Louise. They have a dachshund with them, which was one of their parents’ favourite breeds of dog. It looks like the children were painted in after the painting was first finished. They were no doubt included to bring some life to the painting which would have been bare and cold without them.