The thesis focuses on four sets of official portraits of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, which were painted by the German-born elite portrait specialist Franz Xaver Winterhalter (1805-1873) between 1842 and 1859. These portraits are examined in detail and are placed within the contexts of the existing scholarship on Franz Xaver Winterhalter, British portrait painting of the 1830s and 1840s, and the patronage of portraiture in Britain during the reigns of William IV and Queen Victoria. The thesis compares and contrasts these works with official representations of Queen Victoria and her husband by British artists; and examines the concept of “gender reversal” within the accepted notion of marital pendants by highlighting Winterhalter’s innovations in the genre of official portraiture.The thesis challenges the perception that Winterhalter’s employment at the court of Queen Victoria was due to the Queen’s alleged penchant for “all things German” by placing Winterhalter’s portraits within the context of the British Royal Collection. It examines the reasons for the artist’s success at the British court, accentuating among others Winterhalter’s ability to conceptualise in his portraits of Prince Albert the hierarchically-complex position of the Prince Consort. The overarching arguments of the thesis focus on two propositions - that by employing a foreign artist as her official image maker, Queen Victoria acquired ultimate control over the production, distribution and popularisation of her own imagery; and that this patronage is illustrative of the emergence of a royal and aristocratic international iconography that overrode the competing concept of ‘national’ schools of art.

Thesis (MA) --University of Melbourne, School of Culture and Communication, 2010. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 98-110)