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Royal Cousins and Imperial Russia

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24th July 2018
Princess Alix of Hesse – as the Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna was known before her marriage to the young Tsar Nicholas II in 1894 – visited Cumberland Lodge in Windsor Great Park on several occasions, as the residence of her maternal aunt, Princess Helena of Schleswig-Holstein and her cousins. Cumberland Lodge made a circle for Princess Alix around this part of her English family. She was…
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Portraits of Russian imperial women: Alix and Ella

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26th June 2018
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…
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A Portrait of Princess Alix of Hesse

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14th June 2018
A portrait of the toddler Princess Alix of Hesse by the Austrian painter George Koberwein caught my attention back in 2004. Examining how it came to be painted was a source of great interest to me, not least because the picture that he produced of the baby princess, not…
FeaturesHistory

What did the Tsarina read?

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9th May 2018
A study of the books owned by someone can open a window into their interests, and a royal personage no less so. In so doing, the reading material of the last Empress of Russia, Alexandra Feodorovna (1872-1918) charts important events in her life and tells us a lot about what she saw as significant to keep, or take with her to Russia; her books crucially incorporated her old life into the new…
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Cats and royalty

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22nd January 2018
Alongside the well-established royal love of dogs, cats are far less recorded as preferred pets, unlike their canine counterparts. They have, however, been no less loved by those that did own them. So revered were cats (“mau”) as sacred animals in Ancient Egypt that they…
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Prince Philip may help identify last of the Romanovs

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1st June 2016
Prince Philip is lending a hand or rather his DNA to help identify the last of the Romanovs. The Romanovs, who were executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918, were one of the most powerful Royal Families in history, they ruled from the time of Ivan the Terrible until Nicholas II. In 2007 the bodies of two children were found in a field and are believed to be Maria and Alexei. Historian Simon Sebag…
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