Queen Victoria

1 portrait of Queen Victoria

© National Portrait Gallery, London

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Queen Victoria

by William Henry Southwell, published by Thomas McLean & Co
albumen carte-de-visite, 1860
3 3/8 in. x 2 1/8 in. (85 mm x 53 mm) image size
Acquired, 1937
Photographs Collection
NPG x13971

Sitterback to top

  • Queen Victoria (1819-1901), Reigned 1837-1901. Sitter associated with 548 portraits, Artist or producer associated with 5 portraits.

Artistsback to top

This portraitback to top

With her husband Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Queen Victoria was an early supporter of photography. Both became patrons of the Photographic Society soon after its inception in 1853. Despite posing for many private pictures, it was not until 1860 when John Jabez Edwin Mayall published his 'Royal Album' (fourteen cartes-de-visite of Queen Victoria and her family) that photographs of the queen became both public and available for purchase. In this year Victoria and her family also sat for William Southwell and allowed the results to be published, as was reported in the Morning Post. Victoria was to sit for the Southwells again and it was this second sitting that successfully captured her achievement in projecting a grand and regal image despite her stout figure and diminutive height.

Linked displays and exhibitionsback to top

Events of 1860back to top

Current affairs

An early feminist movement, The Society for Promoting the Employment of Women is founded by Adelaide Anne Proctor, Emily Faithfull, Helen Blackburn, Bessie Parks, Emily Davies, Barbara Bodichon, and Jessie Boucherett.
The Florence Nightingale Training School for Nurses opens at St Thomas's Hospital, in London, funded from the testimonial fund collected for Nightingale following her war services, and helping to establish nursing as a profession.

Art and science

William Morris and new wife Jane Burden move into the Red House, near Bexleyheath, Kent. The house, designed by Philip Webb, represents Morris's principle in interior design, that no object should be in a house that is not beautiful.
Ford Madox Brown paints The Last of England, showing a boat of emigrants leaving England under desperate circumstances, inspired by the emigration of the Pre-Raphaelite Thomas Woolner to Australia in 1852.

International

Italian unification continues as the Treaty of Turin brings much of Northern Italy under nationalist leader Cavour's control, who cedes Savoy and Nice to France. Garibaldi siezes the opportunity to invade Marsala in Sicily with his army of 1,000 redshirts, proclaiming himself dictator in the name of Victor Emmanuel II.
Republican Abraham Lincoln becomes President of the US, with only 39% of the popular vote.

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