People in rooms I

Louis-Philippe, duc de Valois, au berceau, by Nicolas Bernard Lépicié, 1774.

The duc de Chartres (later the duc d'Orléans, later still known as Philippe Égalité) gazes at his first-born son, one day to be King Louis-Philippe.

Lépicié has also included a portrait of the Orléans' young black servant, Scipion.

Die Sentimentale, by Johann Peter Hasenclever, circa 1846-47.

The family of Arent Anthoni Roukens, by Willem Joseph Laquy, 1786.

 The battle-painter, Jørgen Sonne, in his studio, by Ditlev Blunck, circa 1826.

The baptism of Princess Beatrice in the private chapel at Buckingham Palace, 16 June 1857, by Egron Sellif Lundgren, 1857.

Princess Beatrice was the youngest child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, portrayed here surrounded by their other children.

The child's godparents were her maternal grandmother, the Duchess of Kent; her eldest sister; and the latter's fiancé, Prince Friedrich of Prussia.

Marriage of Léopold I, King of the Belgians, and Louise d’Orléans, Château de Compiègne, 9 August 1832, by Joseph-Désiré Court, circa 1832.

Princess Louise was the eldest daughter of Louis-Philippe and Queen Marie Amélie.

Two ladies and an officer seated at tea, unknown artist, circa 1715.

The Art Gallery of Jan Gildemeester, by Adriaan de Lelie, circa 1794-95.

Among the many paintings covering the walls, one of the most noticeable is Gerard ter Borch's Woman Reading a Letter.

***

Bonus: Lépicié's sketch of the infant duc de Valois, a study for the painting at the beginning of this post.

Princess Beatrice, portrait by von Angeli, 1875

Princess Beatrice was eighteen the year Baron von Angeli - her mother Queen Victoria's favorite portrait painter at the time - completed this portrait. Victoria and Albert's youngest child, she is seen here in the bloom of youth; it would be a full decade before her mother would very grudgingly allow her to wed and have a family of her own.

There is some alteration to the color of the paint surface and/or varnish with this painting. Most likely some sort of instability in the paint or medium; several of von Angeli's have a similar discoloration. It's interesting to compare the lithograph below, by Carl Feederle (1832-81), with the original. It has a completely convincing rectangular format, including more of the Princess' wrap and a balustrade. But the original was almost certainly always an oval. Queen Victoria commissioned portraits of all her daughters when they were aged from about seventeen to nineteen years old. (The others are by Winterhalter, who had passed away by the time Beatrice's came due.) Each of the paintings has an oval format, and a frame that matches the one seen here.

Princess Beatrice on her wedding day

The marruage of Princess Beatrice and Prince Henry of Battenberg was celebrated at Saint Mildred's Church, Whippingham, near Osborne House, on the twenty-third of July, 1885. Beatrice, who wore her mother's wedding veil of Honiton lace, was escorted by the Queen - who had put up a lengthy resistance to her daughter's eventual marriage - and Beatrice's eldest brother, the Prince of Wales. I've written about Beatrice and Henry here.

The wedding party. I could wax pedantic and identify all the other people in the photograph, tossing in all sorts of superfluous, tangential detail, but the cabinet card has fortuitously been printed with everyone's name. So let me just add - because I really just can't help myself - that all the girls are nieces of the bride and the two men are brothers of the groom. Oh, and among the girls are two future queens and an empress. Alright, I must stop now...!

Princess Beatrice - portraits, early and late

Richard Lauchert (1823-1869), 1863.

Princess Beatrice Mary Victoria Feodore of the United Kingdom (14 April 1857, Buckingham Palace, London – 26 October 1944, Brantridge Park, Sussex), was the fifth daughter and youngest child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Beatrice was only four years old when her father died and her mother was plunged into a dramatic and famously prolonged mourning. In the ensuing years, the cheerful child would become one of her mother's most important supports. As she grew up and, one by one, her sisters married and left home, she remained as her mother's constant confident and personal secretary.

Franz Winterhalter, 1859.

Annie Dixon (1817-1901), 1861.

And it was expected that her role of attendant would be permanent; Queen Victoria would have no talk of marriage for her youngest daughter. So when, in 1884, she and Prince Henry of Battenberg fell in love and Beatrice told her mother that she planned to marry, the queen stopped speaking to her daughter for seven months. She only acquiesced when Prince Henry agreed to live in England as part of the Queen's household. The couple was married in 1885 and would have four children. (Sadly, Beatrice passed on the haemophilia gene she had inherited from her mother; Beatrice's son Leopold was afflicted with the condition, and her daughter Ena, as Queen Victoria Eugenie, would pass the gene into the Spanish royal family.)

John Philip (1817-1867), 1860.

Edward Tayler (1828-1906), 1864.

The marriage was happy, but Henry chafed at the restrictions of his domestic arrangements. In November of 1895, he persuaded the queen to allow him to go to West Africa and fight in the Fourth Anglo-Ashanti War. But in February he contracted malaria and subsequently died aboard a cruiser off the coast of Sierra Leone. Beatrice was devastated by his death, but after a month away from court, returned to her mother's side where should would remain until the queen's death in 1901.

Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863-1923), 1908.

Her daughter Ena was considered a great beauty and, after converting to Catholicism - a move which caused much controversy in Britain - married King Alfonso XIII of Spain in 1906.  Her youngest son, Maurice, was killed in action during the third month of World War I, a tragedy from which his mother never fully recovered.  Princess Beatrice and her two remaining sons were also affected by the politically motivated surname changes wrought in the midst of the war by her nephew George V when, in an effort to downplay the British royal family's Germanic origins, Battenberg was anglicized to Mountbatten.  And in 1922, her haemophiliac middle son, Leopold, died during hip surgery at the age of thirty-two.

Arthur Stockdale Cope (1857-1940), 1928.

Princess Beatrice's most important contribution to posterity was as the transcriber and editrix of her mother's journals, which the queen had begun keeping in 1831 and had grown to hundreds of volumes. Before her death, Queen Victoria had set her youngest daughter for the task, and had instructed her to remove anything too personal as well as anything that might be hurtful to living persons. The work would take thirty years, and as a consequence of Beatrice's extreme diligence, the edited journals are a third the length of the originals. She then destroyed the originals, to the great chagrin of historians and to the distress of her own family.

She died in her sleep at the age of eighty-seven.

Philip de László, 1926.