IS PRIDE & PREJUDICE A ROMANTIC NOVEL? with John Wiltshire

What do official royal portraits tell us? What messages do they communicate about the sitters – and from the sitters? This paper focuses on early official portraits of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert by Franz Xaver Winterhalter (1805-1873).

It examines hidden meanings within Winterhalter’s early British royal portraits, and explores in particular the emphasis on Prince Albert’s newly-acquired ‘Englishness’ and the notion of a ‘gender reversal’ within the context of traditional marital portraiture.

EUGENE BARILO VON REISBERG is a Melbourne-based arts writer, curator, and blogger. His research on works by Franz Xaver Winterhalter (1805-1873) has gained international recognition, and he is currently working on a PhD thesis on the artist at the University of Melbourne, which investigates the iconographic construction of contemporary aristocratic ideal within Winterhalter’s portraits.

detail of Queen Victoria (1819-1901), 1843 ©HM Queen Elizabeth II (Windsor Castle)