Victorian Portraits

Photograph of a painted half length portrait of Queen Victoria, facing three-quarters to the left. She wears her wedding dress, veil and a floral crown. The portrait (RCIN 400885) was painted by Franz Xaver Winterhalter and was given to Prince Albert by Queen Victoria in 1847, to mark seven years since their marriage. (https://www.rct.uk/collection/2905581/wedding-portrait-of-queen-victoria)

Picture of Robert Browning. Robert Browing was a famous writer and poet of the Romantic period. He was the author of My Last Duchess. The poem created controversies due to its possible connection with Alfonso II d'Este, the Fifth Duke of Ferrara. In the poem, the Duke seems to confess killing his last wife.  

Painting of Lucrezia de'Medici by Agnolo Bronzino. Many believe that Lucrezia de'Medici is the Duchess Browning refers to in the poem My Last Duchess. Lucrezia was only fourteen years old when she married Alfonso II d'Este. She died later…

Morris’s departure for Oxford was a great event in his life. He made close friends who shared his interest in historical and contemporary art, poetry, and contemporary affairs--Edward Burne-Jones, a future painter, Cromwell Price, a future headmaster, Vernon Lushington, a future judge, and Richard Watson Dixon, a future poet and clergyman. This “Oxford Brotherhood” admired the poems Morris had begun to write, and when they decided as a group on the ambitious venture of founding a magazine, The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, Morris became its first editor and chief contributor, writing…

Shift in Psychological conceptions was initiated largely by George Henry Lewes as he developed a “New Psychology” in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. The term “new psychology” heralds in a new shift in the understanding of psychological, changing from the old, dominant models of the early nineteenth century where a person’s psychological state is static and unchanging and developed into a broader understanding in which the mind and psyche can change through biological and environmental factors. He also identified differing levels of consciousness. At the top is higher faculties like…

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's original portrait of Christina Rossetti was completed around 1850. As William Michael Rossetti explains, "The portrait of my sister given in the present volume is taken from a pencil drawing done by Dante Gabriel, which remained quite unnoticed (and by myself forgotten) until I turned it up among her miscellanies after her death. It is much like her, and is possibly the sweetest version of her face that he or anyone ever produced. I should not be surprised if it were a slight study preliminary to the picture…

A variant of this description was originally published at The Rossetti Archive at this location. 

This drawing of Christina Rossetti by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (colored chalk on blue-gray paper) was completed September 1866. The sitter's name, the artist's monogram, and the date are inscribed at upper right: "del. September…