Of the memorials in Kensington Gardens, many share a close connection with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, the most important to the latter being the ornate Gothic masterpiece designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott, known as the Albert Memorial, which was unveiled in 1872 and restored in recent memory. The statue to the great doctor Edward Jenner (1749-1823) was revealed by Prince Albert and has…
The most important monument built to the memory of Prince Albert in London was the magnificent Gothic Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens, designed by George Gilbert Scott, unveiled in 1872.
Officially termed the Prince Consort National Memorial, its location is…
‘You are entering a consecrated building, the burial place of a Queen and her Consort. Please be as quiet as possible’. These respectful words are what greeted any visitor before they entered the Royal Mausoleum of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, at Frogmore in Windsor…
‘The Royal Family in 1846’ by the fashionable German painter, Franz Xaver Winterhalter (1805-73) is an extraordinarily important image.
Queen Victoria regarded it as the painter’s supreme achievement, although he painted the Queen on other occasions, most notably in 1843, in the famous ‘intimate’ portrait, which was Prince Albert’s favourite of her, showing her in a most private image…
Royal menageries became homes for the many animals that were given in previous centuries as political presents from their respective countries and thereby entered a life of exalted captivity, the nature of any zoo now being a controversial one.
The oldest baroque zoo was…
The imperial palace of Schönbrunn in the western suburb of Hietzing on the outskirts of Vienna, was the summer residence of the former Habsburg dynasty. It stuns with its magnificence, but then this, of course, was part of its purpose and is the power of its architecture.
One of the earliest names that occurs in the life of the future Queen Victoria is that of ‘Siebold’; although the name vanishes almost on the first mention. But no single name should be rendered insignificant just because it only occurs once.
This is undoubtedly the case with Madame Siebold or more precisely, Charlotte Heidenreich von Siebold (1788-1859). Madame Siebold was an accoucheuse who…
The Swiss Cottage at Osborne is a capsule of successive royal childhood, which continued to hold a place in the affections of the first children that used it – the nine children of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert – long after they had grown up, just as it would for…
On 20 June 1837, Princess Victoria of Kent was awoken in her bedroom at Kensington Palace, writing later in her journal entry for that day, in which significantly the proud new word ‘alone’ features intermittently (also underlined), we read: “I was awoke at 6…
The artworks by the fashionable German portrait painter and historical artist Friedrich August von Kaulbach (1860-1920) of Princess Alix of Hesse, later Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna and her elder sister, Elisabeth Feodorovna, ‘Ella’ Grand Duchess Sergei of Russia, provide, I think, a rare insight into these two princesses who would both marry into the Russian Imperial House of Romanov. Not…
