royalty and photography
Many monarchs who never touched a camera found uses for photography and, in the 20th century, had to adapt to the ubiquitous presence of photographers. Royal engagement with the medium has included photograph collecting; patronage of photographers and their associations; the initiation of major photographic projects; and strategies to manage the representation of royalty in modern societies.
In the background was the 19th-century concept of ‘bourgeois monarchy’. In countries like the Netherlands and Great Britain this was paired with ‘limited monarchy’ and constitutionalism. But even in states such as Prussia and Russia, where monarchs had far greater powers, its moral and personal aspects were influential. These were exemplified, on the one hand, by expectations of gentlemanly conduct, dedication, and self-discipline and, on the other, by a distinction between office and person, and recognition that a monarch could have a private life separate from the ceremonial sphere. Railways and country residences facilitated this, with retreats like Balmoral, Livadia, and Hohenschwangau offering more privacy and comfort than hotel-like draughty piles such as Buckingham Palace, the Winter Palace, and the Munich Residenz. Royal yachts served the same purpose. With such amenities, even an autocrat like Tsar Nicholas II could spend time playing the paterfamilias, sportsman, and squire.
Photography, sometimes by professionals but increasingly by monarchs themselves or their families, was a means of demarcating this private sphere and chronicling its activities. Initially the pictures, assembled in family albums, remained strictly private. But eventually selected samples began to be made public, sometimes with the quasi-propagandistic aim of lending monarchies an appealingly ‘ordinary’ image as external events threatened their survival. Occasionally, if a home-made product did not exist, it was re-created. A classic British example was the 1936 series of informal portraits by Lisa Sheridan of George VI's young daughters, Elizabeth and Margaret, at play with their pets, which evoked a domestic idyll after the bruising abdication crisis. This was a stage in an ongoing process of negotiation, starting in Edward VII's reign (1901-10), between the monarchy and the media, in which the stakes were privacy for the royal family in exchange for glimpses of real or constructed intimacy for the press. The process reached its apogee in Elizabeth II's reign (1952- ), but in an environment in which fascination with royalty merged with a global celebrity culture, and challenges to privacy increased.
A comprehensive history of monarchies' involvement with photography has yet to be written. But examples from German-speaking Central Europe, France, Russia, Turkey, and, again, Britain suggest key themes.
Central Europe
The region developed a rich photographic culture and, until 1918, also had a plethora of princely houses, ranging from the rulers of minute principalities to heavyweight dynasties like the Austrian Habsburgs and Prussian Hohenzollerns. In Vienna, Archduchess Maria Theresia, sister-in-law of Emperor Franz Joseph, was a keen amateur and patron of important photographic events in the city, and in the early 1860s Empress Elizabeth was one of many keen royal collectors of celebrity portraits. In Berlin, although Friedrich Wilhelm IV had had his portrait taken as early as 1847, the first serious royal amateur was apparently Princess Victoria, daughter of Queen Victoria, who married Crown Prince (later, briefly, Emperor) Friedrich in 1858. Later, her granddaughter Viktoria Luise became a lifelong snapshooter. But the most interesting case was Victoria's son, Emperor Wilhelm II. Although Wilhelm probably took no photographs himself, his reign (1888-1918) coincided with the emergence of photojournalism, and his histrionic public appearances and passion for dressing up fed an increasingly image-hungry mass press. Even cruises aboard the imperial yacht were accompanied by a photographer. (When Wilhelm visited Palestine in 1898, a French cartoonist depicted him, posing theatrically in uniform, surrounded by shutter-clicking hacks.) Wilhelm's craving for publicity, but inability to use it constructively, doubtless helped to convey an image of him—and, by extension, Germany—as a dynamic but unpredictable player on the international scene.
Bavaria's art-loving king, Ludwig I (reg. 1825-48), was immediately captivated by the idea of photography; and in August 1839, after receiving three sample images from Daguerre, had the Frenchman admitted to the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. The same month, the Munich pioneer Franz Kobell demonstrated the process to the court. Ludwig's son Maximilian II (reg. 1848-64) patronized the Munich photographers Franz Hanfstaengl and, especially, Joseph Albert, who became a regular visitor at the royal family's summer retreat at Hohenschwangau, and photographed Maximilian on his deathbed in March 1864. However, patronage of Albert increased exponentially under Ludwig II (reg. 1864-86), who commissioned innumerable portraits and lent him funds for a sumptuous new studio. From 1868 Albert also became a key figure in Ludwig's castle-building programme, not only documenting construction but photographing interiors and decorative details at Versailles and elsewhere to provide copy material for the craftsmen—commissions which often pushed his technical ingenuity to the limit. Although the king's death in June 1886 halted construction, Albert continued to profit from the buildings' tourist appeal.
France
Photography's efflorescence under the Second Empire (1852-70) owed much to imperial patronage, although the roles of Napoleon III and the state are not always precisely distinguishable. Bisson, Le Gray, Mayer & Pierson, Nègre, and, above all, Disdéri were among the best-known beneficiaries. Both Napoleon and Empress Eugénie were keenly interested in photography: the latter as a portrait collector, the former undoubtedly for propagandistic reasons. The regime's watchwords were modernization, social stability, and national revival. Court and public festivities, military exercises, railway building, Baron Haussmann's transformation of Paris, and pioneering institutions (e.g. the Imperial Asylum at Vincennes for disabled workmen, photographed by Nègre in 1859) were all recorded. The imperial family was constantly photographed, as were the court's activities at summer retreats like Saint-Cloud and Compiègne, although many of these more private pictures were later destroyed.
Russia
Particularly interesting, as Alia Barkovets has described it, was the reign of Tsar Nicholas II (1894-1917). He continued the practice of retaining a court photographer: initially the veteran Sergei Levitsky, who had held the post since 1877, but then, until his death in 1916, A. K. Yagelsky, who worked under the commercial name of C. E. de Hahn. Ever in attendance, Yagelsky covered the imperial family's public and private activities—from c. 1900 also with a cinematograph—travelled with them, and instructed the children; his thousands of pictures appeared both in official publications and in the Romanov albums. Despite his shyness, Nicholas was comfortable with this arrangement, and contemporary observers described him being photographed, both by ‘Hahn’ and others, wherever he went. Nicholas also dispensed important patronage, most notably to Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii, whose ambitious scheme to create a colour-photographic survey of the empire was supported with money and practical assistance. Finally, almost the entire imperial family were keen amateurs. Nicholas probably acquired the habit from his wife, Alexandra of Hesse-Darmstadt, although his mother was also interested. Eventually their daughters Olga, Tatiana, and Anastasia all acquired their own photographic outfits and albums, and Nicholas amused himself with a Kodak panoramic camera. Picnics, tennis matches, family get-togethers, cruises, and even Nicholas's dangerous illness in 1900 were recorded and the pictures pasted into albums, an activity that the tsar found therapeutic. ‘After breakfast’, he wrote in his diary on 12 December 1913, ‘many people pestered me with intolerable questions which vexed and annoyed me! Had a good walk in between the showers. Glued photographs into the album.’ This continued during the First World War and in the first months after Nicholas's abdication in February 1917, though not in the family's final period of captivity at Ekaterinburg. On 17 July 1918, by a grisly coincidence, the Romanovs' chief executioner was a former professional photographer.
Turkey
Ottoman sultans beginning with Abdul Aziz (1861-76) took an interest in photography. Court ceremonies were photographed, and official portraits were made of members of the royal family. During his long reign, Abdul Hamid (1876-1909) expanded the official uses of photography in various ways, employing numerous court photographers.
The Abdul Hamid albums, assembled at the behest of the sultan for presentation to the American and British governments in 1893 and 1894, conveyed a very particular view of the Ottoman Empire to those audiences. The two sets of albums are nearly identical, each consisting of 51 volumes containing about 1, 820 photographs. These focus primarily on the most up-to-date aspects of the empire: the modern city or major architectural monuments; military installations, including training establishments, hospitals, and troops; schools and their students; and accoutrements of the palace. Hundreds of photographs depict people, including, for example, the sixth class of the Military Medical School, complete with cadaver (an important sign of modernity).
A second important royal Ottoman project was the Yildiz albums, now in the Istanbul University Library. Filled with images from all over the empire taken on Abdul Hamid's orders, the albums contain approximately 34, 879 photographs. These include the same views as the two presentation sets discussed above, as well as subjects unsuitable for export, such as the new police stations built throughout the empire, and prisoners accused of various crimes. Thought to have served as a means for the sultan to keep abreast of events in his far-flung dominions and abroad, the albums show official ceremonies, new Ottoman factories, catalogues of goods, portraits of officials, and monuments and works of art from Europe and Japan. They seem to exemplify the use of photography as a means of official surveillance which was emerging in other states as well as the Ottoman Empire.
Great Britain
The longest involvement of a major dynasty with photography has been that of the British one. Already by 1910, its collection contained c.25, 000 items. Queen Victoria's consort, Prince Albert, was an energetic patron of the new medium until his death in 1861. One of his major projects, involving many photographers, was the inventorization of royal buildings and works of art, including a huge collection of Raphael drawings which was systematically photographed and combined with reproductions of works in other collections. Individual photographers favoured by Victoria and Albert included Roger Fenton, who took numerous family portraits and received royal assistance (though not funds) for his Crimean journey in 1855; and Francis Bedford, who was sent by Victoria to Albert's native Coburg in 1857 to take surprise pictures for his birthday, then to the Middle East with the prince of Wales in 1862. Another association was with George Washington Wilson, who recorded Princess Victoria's engagement to the Prussian crown prince in September 1855 and became ‘Photographer to the Queen’ in Scotland. Wilson's 1863 carte de visite portrait of Victoria on her pony Fyvie, attended by John Brown—an important go-between for Wilson at court—sold spectacularly, and five years later the photographer published a set of Scottish views designed to be bound with Victoria's best-selling Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the Highlands. Finally, the royal couple were enthusiastic photograph collectors, their acquisitions ranging from 1850s exhibition pieces by figures like Fenton, O. G. Rejlander (whose Two Ways of Life (1857) hung in Albert's dressing room), Gustave Le Gray (The English Fleet at Cherbourg, 1858), and John Murray (Indian views) to portraits and topical images from across the empire. Particularly moving was an annotated album of Crimean veterans and invalids—some displaying the projectiles that had maimed them—photographed on Victoria's instructions by Joseph Cundall, Robert Howlett, and John Mayall in 1855-6.
Although Prince Albert understood photographic technology, no pictures by him appear to have survived. But other family members, from Queen Victoria's daughter Victoria to Elizabeth II's son Andrew, became keen amateurs. Particularly talented and prolific was the Danish-born Princess (later Queen) Alexandra, who married Edward, prince of Wales, in 1863. Especially after acquiring a Kodak No. 1 roll-film camera in 1889 she became an assiduous photographer of public occasions, cruises, and meetings with her own and her husband's far-flung network of relations. In 1897, with other family members, she contributed to an exhibition organized by Kodak, and in 1908 published 136 of her photographs in a successful charity volume, Queen Alexandra's Christmas Gift Book.
Prince Albert had himself daguerreotyped by Richard Beard (1801-85) in 1842, and subsequently private family portraits were taken by Fenton, Wilson, household members, or employees like Dr Ernst Becker (1826-88) and William Bambridge (1819-79), and various commercial firms. But it was not until 1860 that royal portraits could be sold, opening the way to a hugely profitable business. Registers at the National Archives, Kew, list hundreds of portraits submitted for protection under the Fine Art Copyright Act of 1862. The prince and princess of Wales especially, society's most glamorous couple, became domestic icons whose images appear in countless family albums, and who were photographed by most of the leading firms. In the 20th century, the style of royal portraiture ranged from domesticity (Sheridan in the 1930s) to romantic, fairy-tale regality (Cecil Beaton from July 1939 into the 1950s) and a more modern, sophisticated glamour (Patrick Lichfield and Lord Snowdon in the 1960s and 1970s). By the 1990s, however, the royal image had become increasingly contested and difficult to control. In particular, Diana, princess of Wales's dual status as royal personage and global icon created an unprecedented situation that ultimately contributed to her death in September 1997. In the 21st century pictures of the British royal family will doubtless continue to be extremely lucrative. They will also reflect, and have a bearing on, the position of the monarchy and the family's relationship with the wider society.
— Robin Lenman
Bibliography
- Ranke, W., Joseph Albert: Hofphotograph der bayerischen Könige (1977).
- Dimond F., and Taylor, R., Crown & Camera: The Royal Family and Photography 1842-1910 (1987).
- Gavin, C. (ed.), Imperial Self-Portrait: The Ottoman Empire as Revealed in the Sultan Abdul Hamid II's Photograph Albums (1988).
- Barkovets, A., ‘Photographs in the State Archive of the Russian Federation of the Last Russian Emperor and his Family’, in R. Timms (ed.), Nicholas & Alexandra: The Last Imperial Family of Tsarist Russia (1998).
- Dimond, F., Developing the Picture: Queen Alexandra and the Art of Photography (2004)
