Romantic and risqué birthday presents exchanged between Queen Victoria and Prince Albert will be on display at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight on Friday (24th May) as English Heritage celebrates the 200th anniversary of their births.
‘Celebration: Victoria & Albert’s Birthdays at Osborne’ will provide an intimate glimpse into the private romantic lives of the royal couple at their seaside retreat.
Queen Victoria may have given the appearance in her later life of an austere and prudish monarch, but the birthday gifts exchanged between her and Prince Albert tell a different story; one of a sexually charged private relationship.
Personal portraits, nude sculptures and a painting of bathing maidens are among some of the presents on display at Osborne which reveal an intense passion between the royal couple, expressing a deeply intimate relationship which they were not able to show publicly.
Michael Hunter, English Heritage Curator at Osborne, said:
“Queen Victoria may be remembered as the mourning widow in black, but these gifts show a different side to her personality. She was open to nudity and the sensuous, more open than Albert who perhaps surprisingly was the more prudish of the pair. It was Victoria who purchased Franz Xaver Winterhalter’s Florinda, a painting of semi-nude women preparing to bathe, for Albert’s birthday, and it was her wish that it should hang directly opposite their writing desks at Osborne, where it remains today.”
“The new display and new trail at Osborne for Queen Victoria’s birthday showcases these objects, casting off perceptions of traditional Victorian sensibility and showing a woman most ardently in love with her husband and with art.”
At Osborne on Thursday 24th May 1849, her 30th birthday, Queen Victoria wrote: “This day was again welcomed in by the tender love & affection of my dearest Albert”. And so it goes on in her journals, year after year of birthday mornings recorded at their Isle of Wight home, beginning with the ‘tender love’ of Albert whilst a band played under their window. This was until Albert died suddenly in 1861 and Osborne changed for the Queen. She no longer visited on their birthdays and her love of collecting art dwindled, there being no Albert to share it with.
Celebration: Victoria & Albert’s Birthdays at Osborne will open to the public on Friday 24th May on Queen Victoria’s 200th birthday.
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert: Top 5 Romantic Gifts
- Florinda by Franz Xaver Winterhalter (1805-73), 1852
- La Filatrice Addormentata (or The Sleeping Spinner) by Julius Troschel (1806-63), 1845
- Prince Albert by Emil Wolff (1802-79), 1844
- The Bather by John Lawlor (1820-1901), 1855
- L’Allegro by William Edward Frost (1810-77), 1848
For more information, visit https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/osborne/royal-presents-at-osborne/.
