1215
for instruction and inventory purposes, or as an art form
in its own right.
By the early 1850s, the Royal couple had commis-
sioned photographers such as William Kilburn and
Brunell to take pictures of their family. These were at
fi rst intended solely for private use, but within a few
years the Queen and her husband had begun to realise
how photography could be used to make the Royal Fam-
ily better known to the public; this was to lead to the
expansion of Royal photographic portraiture throughout
the nineteenth century and beyond. By 1900, such im-
ages were as much an appanage of Royalty as painted
State portraits had ever been.
In 1853 Queen Victoria and Prince Albert became pa-
trons of the Photographic Society (later the Royal Pho-
tographic Society). When they visited its fi rst exhibition
in January 1854, the Honorary Secretary, Roger Fenton,
showed them the latest developments in the art through
his own work and that of other photographers. As a result
he was given the fi rst of his royal commissions, which
included photographing the Royal children taking part in
a series of tableaux to celebrate their parents’ fourteenth
wedding anniversary in February 1854.
Work by other photographers, including William Lake
Price, Alfred Rosling, and Oscar Rejlander was also pur-
chased by the Queen and the Prince. George Washington
Wilson, Adolfe Disderi, and J.J,E. Mayall were com-
missioned for specifi c purposes: Mayall’s Royal Album,
produced in 1860, made photographs of the Royal Family
available to the general public for the fi rst time.
By the time of the Prince Consort’s death in De-
cember 1861, he and the Queen had collected several
thousand images. These included British and foreign
Royalty, Royal Household offi cials and staff, friends,
acquaintances, politicians, actors, artists and musicians
and the armed forces. In addition there were views of
Royal residences, scenes at Coburg and Gotha (made in
1857 and 1858 by Francis Bedford as birthday presents
from the Queen to her husband); military, topographi-
cal, art and genre photographs, and reproductions of
works of art.
Queen Victoria continued to collect photographs in
memory of the interest which she and her husband had
shared, but her preference was less for art and genre
photography and more for portraiture; one series of
44 albums, Portraits of Royal Children, showed her
descendants from 1848–1899. Many photographers,
including Dr. Ernst Becker (Prince Albert’s German
librarian), T.R. Williams, William Bambridge, Leonida
Caldesi, Camille Silvy, Hughes & Mullins, Hills &
Saunders, Mendelssohn, Alexander Bassano, Charles
Bergamasco, George Piner Cartland, Professor E.
Uhlenhuth, Backofen, W. & D. Downey and others were
employed to produce this record. Many were granted
the Royal Warrant.
The Queen also collected photographs of her rela-
tives, staff, and people she had met, or was unable to
meet except through the medium of photography.
Among the portrait photographers whose work she
purchased was Julia Margaret Cameron. Other material
showed military campaigns, ceremonial occasions, such
as the Queen’s Jubilees in 1887 and 1897, or historic
buildings, such as J. Benjamin Stone’s photographs of
the Tower of London in 1898. Views taken in Europe,
Australia, India, the Andaman Islands, Africa and else-
where enabled the Queen to see foreign countries and
parts of the British Empire which she herself was never
able to visit.
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had encouraged
their children’s interest in photography and several of
them, including the Prince of Wales (later King Edward
VII) and Prince Alfred (later Duke of Edinburgh and of
Saxe-Coburg-Gotha) learnt how to use a camera in their
youth. During the nineteenth century all nine Royal
children, by this time adults with their own families,
collected photographs and many of these, formerly kept
in their separate residences, had by the late twentieth
century become part of the Royal Photograph Collec-
tion. They included property belonging to Prince Alfred,
Princess Helena (Princess Christian of Schleswig-Hol-
stein) and Prince Arthur (Duke of Connaught) and his
wife, as well as Queen Victoria’s grandchildren, such as
the future King George V and Queen Mary.
The most signifi cant collection belonged to Albert
Edward, Prince of Wales, who by the time of his mar-
riage in 1863 had assembled at least 1,000 images,
mostly documentary or topographical, such as Roger
Fenton’s Crimean War series, or the views taken by
Francis Bedford during the Prince’s Tour of the Near
East in 1862. From an early age the Prince also collected
photographs of works of art. During the1860s he as-
sembled a number of volumes of views of foreign cities,
important buildings and other material which interested
him, including some genre photographs by R.P. Nap-
per. The Prince and his wife, (later Queen Alexandra),
kept photographs of themselves, their family and their
residences, and by the 1880s had lent their support to
a new development. Simplifi ed cameras, for amateurs,
were newly available, and George Eastman presented
one to the Prince and Princess in 1885. Within a few
years the Princess had become a skilled and enthusiastic
practitioner.
The last decade of the nineteenth century saw the
various collections expanding as the Princess of Wales,
her daughter, Princess Victoria, the Duchess of York,
the Duchess of Connaught and others began compil-
ing albums which contained not only work by profes-
sional photographers but also their own snapshots.
When members of the Royal Family openly supported
photography by exhibiting some of their own work at