Queen Victoria’s sapphire and diamond
coronet will be on permanent display this year at London’s Victoria
& Albert Museum, as part of the museum’s 2019 bicentenary
celebration to mark the births of both Queen Victoria and Prince
Albert, to whom of course, the museum owes its name. Displayed in
the V&A Museum’s Jewellery Galleries, this magnificent coronet
is among those pieces of…
In the summer of 1878, Queen Victoria’s
second daughter, Princess Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse, came to
Eastbourne, because she had been ordered rest. The sojourn on the
East Sussex coast was the gift of Queen Victoria to her daughter,
(David Duff, Hessian Tapestry, 177)…
Queen Victoria’s love of Scotland and the
Scottish Highlands is of course, legendary – immortalised in a
wealth of artworks, souvenir albums, including the Queen’s own
watercolours and not least of course, the Queen’s Highland
journals. She praised…
But for the moving memorial that Queen
Victoria erected to her and for a letter in which this is
described, the name of Ida Bonanomi might have been completely
forgotten in historical terms. Thanks to these, this is not the
case. It can be found in Edinburgh’s Rosebank Cemetery and stands
in the avenue containing the grandest of the monuments, itself an
impressive example of mid-Victorian…
The Duke of Edinburgh has become a royal
record breaker. Again. He is now the longest lived descendant of
Queen Victoria. Prince Philip, born on June 10th 1921 in Corfu,
overtook Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone who was one of Queen
Victoria’s granddaughters. She lived…
In a recent life of Queen Victoria, (A.
N. Wilson, Victoria: A Life, 2014) I stumbled across an
illustration of one of the famous group photographs taken behind
the Palais Edinburg in Coburg, showing Queen Victoria surrounded by
a whole host of contemporary royalty –…
Aged sixteen, Princess Victoria made a
pencil sketch of herself. Knowing the vividness of the watercolours
that she made for her sketchbook and the skilled drawings she made
during this time of other important figures in her youth, it is
fascinating that she chose to apply the same exactness of
observation to herself. It is, of course, however, not the only
self-portrait that she made. The date…
Whilst researching for a forthcoming
academic article on Louisa Louis, the devoted dresser to Princess
Charlotte of Wales (1771-1838) who was deeply valued by Queen
Victoria, I encountered the name of Mrs Brock. She belongs to that
fascinating roll-call of characters that…
If you think royal baby mania is a new
thing, think again. For centuries, the arrival of a regal bundle of
joy has got plenty of people talking. Queen Victoria and Prince
Albert kept the papers and the people happy for the best part of
two decades as they went about building…
Two hundred years after her birth, Queen
Victoria is taking over Buckingham Palace again. As part of the
celebrations for the bicentenary of the birth of Britain’s second
longest reigning monarch, the most famous royal residence of them
all will host a special exhibition focusing on the impact Victoria
had there. The display, called Queen Victoria’s Palace, will show
visitors how the young…
