Queen Victoria This article is more than 4 years oldQueen Victoria's risqué side revealed with nude-filled collection
This article is more than 4 years oldRomantic gifts exchanged between Victoria and Prince Albert will be displayed at Isle of Wight’s Osborne House
Queen Victoria is sometimes remembered as prudish, buttoned-up and disapproving, but a new display reveals a woman well in touch with the more sensuous side of her nature.
Romantic and risqué gifts exchanged between Victoria and Prince Albert are to go on display at Osborne House, the couple’s grand seaside retreat on the Isle of Wight, which is stuffed with art and fabulous objects that the couple bought for each other.
“There is an abundance of naked flesh here at Osborne in both two and three dimensions,” said Michael Hunter, an English Heritage curator.
Helped by the ITV drama Victoria, many myths about the queen have been exploded but the image of her “as an older lady dressed in black and rather miserable” persists.
The birthday gifts show a very different side. “She was open to nudity and the sensuous – more open than Albert, who perhaps surprisingly was the more prudish of the pair.”
One of the most eye-popping gifts is a huge painting by Franz Xaver Winterhalter called Florinda, which Victoria bought for Albert’s 33rd birthday in 1852. She asked for it to hang facing their writing desks in their sitting room, where it remains to this day.
“There was Queen Victoria and Prince Albert working side by side on serious papers and letters confronted, full frontal, with a very erotic bevy of semi-clad girls,” said Hunter. “There is an erotic charge in this very private room.”
For both of them, the giving of gifts was as joyful as the receiving. On her birthday in May 1855, Victoria gave Albert a sensuous marble statue, The Bather by John Lawlor, a nude female figure sitting pensively on a rock. It can still be found in the house’s billiard room.
Another eye-catcher is a painting Victoria bought for Albert’s birthday in 1848, L’Allegro by William Edward Frost, which shows the daughters of Zeus, the Three Graces, joyfully cavorting semi-naked through the countryside.
Among the gifts in the seemed-a-good-idea-at-the-time category is a statue that Prince Albert commissioned from Emil Wolff of himself as a handsome Greek warrior. “It is a very risqué, erotic image,” said Hunter. “There is a fantasy element to it.”
Victoria loved it, calling it “very beautiful”, but Albert quickly had misgivings about displaying it in public, the bare legs and feet making it look “too undressed to place in a room”.
They eventually hid it away upstairs and a second version was commissioned with sandals and a longer tunic. It currently resides at Buckingham Palace.
The display marks the 200th birthday year of both Victoria and Albert. Some of the gifts will be in the flower-strewn room that the couple used for gift exchanges, and more than 70 others will be pointed out on a trail. Visitors will also hear music, an evocation of the brass band Albert instructed to wake up the royal couple on special occasions.
Hunter hopes the milestone year will provide more opportunities to change perceptions about Prince Albert. “He was very shy, quite introverted, but in the family home, in private, friends record how jolly and happy and funny he was.”
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