Artware Fineart has dated this Victorian Portrait Oil Painting to the 1800s.
Portrait of Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (1819–1861), Prince Consort
1st November 1840
oil on canvas
36 x 28 in. (92 x 72 cm.)
John of Jerusalem;
Notes
William Charles Ross painted a watercolour on ivory mounted on card in the royal Collection | 20.3 x 13.4 cm (support, canvas/panel/str external) | RCIN 420665. the miniature is Signed on the reverse in ink: H.R.H. / Prince Albert, KG / Sir W.C. Ross pinx: and was Commissioned by Queen Victoria from the artist in 1840. William Charles Ross was not just known as miniaturist he was also a successful painter of oil portraits on canvas, for example there is a portrait of Thomas Erskine 1st baron Erskine in the National Portrait Gallery and a portrait of Frederick Webb 1790-1846 in Newstead Abbey. This portrait is a portrait painted at the same time as the Miniature in 1840.
Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (1819–1861), prince consort, consort of Queen Victoria, was born on 26 August 1819 at the ducal summer residence of the duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, the Rosenau, on the southern edge of the forest of Thuringen, about 4 miles from Coburg. On 19 September 1819 in the marble hall at the Rosenau he was baptized Franz Karl August Albrecht Immanuel with water from the River Itze, which flowed through the duchy. His name was immediately Anglicized by his family to Albert, the only one of his given names that was ever used. The reigning duke was his father, Ernest (1784–1844), who had named his first son and heir, born a year earlier, after himself. The mother of the boys, who would be their only children, was the former Princess Louise (1800–1831) of neighbouring, but larger and richer, Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg. Seventeen years younger than her husband, she had married him at sixteen on 31 July 1817.
The duke's rakish ways were unreformed by his marriage. After the birth of his sons he resumed his earlier sports of hunting and wenching. Louise consoled herself with flirtations, the last with a young lieutenant, Baron Alexander von Hanstein. On 4 September 1824 the unhappy duchess was banished from Coburg and left her small sons forever. The legal separation which Ernest had demanded was followed by formal divorce in 1826, after which Louise married Hanstein. She died of uterine cancer in August 1831.
By 1826 the duchy and the princelings had new names, as the death of the last eligible male descendant in Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg meant a rearrangement of mini-states. Ernest added Gotha in exchange for Saalfeld (which went to the duke of Meiningen), creating the hyphenated designation by which the young Albert was later identified. Although abandoned at five, Albert understood—much later—the circumstances of his mother's departure and never doubted her affection; her loss could hardly have been repaired by the attentions of Christoph Florschütz, who in his mid-twenties had been engaged as tutor to the brothers. Albert became quiet and subdued, subject to fits of weeping which he confessed candidly in a journal begun, precociously, when he was less than six. Early on, Florschütz was not quite the benign influence he was later to become. On 26 March 1825 Albert wrote that he had ‘made so many mistakes’ in a letter that ‘the Rath’—his tutor—‘tore it up and threw it into the fire. I cried about it’ (Grey, 34).
Albert's awkwardness with, and dislike of, his father, whom he had good reason to blame for a lonely and insecure childhood, was blunted by time, as were his impressions of Florschütz, who became, as Albert grew up, an affectionate companion and devoted teacher. Tutorial impatience, however, emerges in Albert's notation when not yet six, ‘I cried at my lesson t
Artware Fineart has dated this Victorian Portrait Oil Painting to the 1800s.
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Sir William Charles Ross, 1794 - 1860 Portrait of Prince Albert of Saxe-coburg and Gotha (1819–1861), Prince Consort
