Introduction

This year’s bicentenary celebrations in honour of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert deliberately put the spotlight not only on the Royal couple themselves, but also on the unsung and forgotten individuals who helped make their achievements possible. This particular exhibition is devoted to Albert’s personal servants. When the Prince moved to England in 1840 to marry Queen Victoria, he took with him several members of his household who were already in his service in Coburg. They not only took care of his physical well-being and carried out various tasks, but also helped make the separation from his home more bearable and remained his link with Coburg until his untimely death.

In order to present them visually to a wider audience, we have compiled a selection of photographs which can be seen on large boards in various retail stores in Coburg until the end of 2019 – as well as electronically here in the Visitor Centre of Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.

These images, kept by the Royal Collection Trust, are valuable examples of early photography. Most of the images shown here are reproductions of albumen prints. Historically, they followed the daguerreotype process developed between 1835 and 1839 by the French painter Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre. This was the first commercially used photographic method, and it took twenty years until it was replaced by other techniques. Albumen printing was the first commercially viable process for producing photographic prints from paper-based negatives. Prince Albert, who was always open to new scientific and technological developments, enthusiastically welcomed this new invention and commissioned entire photo series. He had himself photographed for the first time in 1842 and then, almost obsessively, everything that could be taken pictures of: his family, the Royal residences, English and Scottish landscapes, cityscapes, his hunting excursions, ships and the coast of England. This was primarily done to bring the Royal family closer to the people. Photographers were sent all over the world. For example, Albert commissioned a major project capturing the entire body of work of Raphael, the Italian master of the High Renaissance, who the Prince held in high esteem. Moreover, the English photographer Francis Bedford travelled to Coburg in 1856 to take pictures of the ducal residences in Albert’s hometown. Dozens of photo albums and thousands of photographs are still kept in the Royal Collection in Windsor Castle. Among them are four albums of photographic images that captured the men and women of Victoria and Albert’s English and German household.

The viewer of the exhibition will notice that the people shown here are almost exclusively men. Of course, there were women in Queen Victoria’s and Prince Albert’s household, too. The list of Buckingham Palace residents, for example, includes 48 female employees in the 1841 English census. Most of these women, however, were in Victoria’s service and of English origin, whereas Albert’s German servants were all men. Our exhibition owes its composition to this fact.