This shows the princess as she appeared at her 'first drawing-room', i.e. when she attended her first official reception at the palace. Winterhalter was a dashing portraitist who is not always valued at his true worth in my view. She married the future Friedrich III of Germany, who ruled for only 99 days. She was a keen amateur painter:
Little Willie. Bismarck deliberately turned him against his parents, since he regarded them as being tainted by decadent English ideas. If Friedrich III had survived, it is quite possible that he would have introduced a form of cabinet government on the English model, with a more circumscribed constitutional role for the monarch. Most of his children shared his fairly liberal ideas, but Wilhelm certainly did not.
An Italian peasant-woman, 1862; amateur artists have lost one of their best subjects since peasants stopped wearing these colurfulk costumes.
Her daughter Margarethe in 1876. Not bad at all. Victoria bequeathed her castle at Kronberg to Margarethe (1872-1954), who married a prince a Hesse, so it is now owned by the Hessian royal family. The presence of the painter's colony at Kronberg was presumably one of the reasons why she went to live there. The Kaiser treated her very badly, preventing his family from having much to do with her. More of her paintings and drawing can be found here, along with paintings and photographs of her:
http://www.kronberger-maler.de/victoria/index.html
