Danish-British Consort Portraiture, c.1600-1900

By Sara Ayres

This is the first book to address the long art history of dynastic marriage exchange between Denmark and Britain between 1600 and 1900, exploring portraiture, gender, and the court as a centre of cultural exchange. This work re-evaluates the construction and staging of gender in Northern consort portraiture over a span of three hundred years, examining the development of the scientific and social paradigms inflecting consort portraiture and representation, with a view to excavating portrait images' agency at the early modern moment of their conception. The consort's liminal position between royal houses, territories, languages, and religion has often been equated with political weakness, but this new work argues that this position endowed the consort with a unique space for innovation in the representation of elite identity. Each chapter is informed by new archival research and introduces the reader to little known, yet astonishing works of art. Collectively, they seek to trace a shift in practices of identity formation over time; the transition from an emphasis on rank to an increasingly binary emphasis on gender.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lund Humphries
• Release date: May 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9781848226753

Book preview

Front Cover of Danish-British Consort Portraiture, c.1600-1900Half Title of Danish-British Consort Portraiture, c.1600-1900

Northern Lights

Series Editor: Walter Melion, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Art History, Emory University, and Foreign Member, KNAW, Royal Netherlands

Academy of Arts and Sciences

The ‘Northern Lights’ book series profiles Northern art in its infinite variety, including paintings, sculptures, objects and architecture. Often the phrase ‘Northern art’ conjures iconic works of the Northern Renaissance and the ‘Dutch Golden Age’. While welcoming contributions about such works, this series also looks beyond ‘the usual suspects’. The extended time period – from the Middle Ages to the 19th century – invites authors to explore themes in Northern art without the constraint of conventional chronological boundaries. The expansive geographical coverage offers the potential to highlight the names and works of artists and movements that haven’t been privileged in art-historical publishing up until now.

The series publishes illustrated thematic surveys, artist monographs and histories of Northern art collections in museums. It incorporates a range of volumes, from more specialised studies for scholars, to books that are accessible to art enthusiasts.

Book Title of Danish-British Consort Portraiture, c.1600-1900

First published in 2023

by Lund Humphries

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Danish-British Consort Portraiture, c.1600–1900 © Sara Ayres, 2023

All rights reserved

ISBN 978–1–84822–518–3

A Cataloguing-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise, without first seeking the permission of the copyright owners and publishers. Every effort has been made to seek permission to reproduce the images in this book. Any omissions are entirely unintentional, and details should be addressed to the publishers.

Sara Ayres has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this Work.

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FRONT COVER:

Peder Als, Caroline Mathilde in the Uniform of her Life Guards (1770), oil on canvas,

147 × 115 cm, private collection

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1Anna of Denmark (1574–1619)

2Prince George of Denmark (1653–1708)

3Louisa of Great Britain (1724–1751)

4Caroline Matilda of Great Britain (1751–1775)

5Alexandra of Denmark (1844–1925)

Notes

Bibliography

Image Credits

Acknowledgments

This book was begun during a postdoctoral fellowship undertaken at the National Portrait Gallery, London, between 2016 and 2018, generously supported by the Carlsberg Foundation in association with The Museum of National History at Frederiksborg Castle. I am grateful to former Head of Research at the National Portrait Gallery, Peter Funnell, for his kind supervision. Writing a book from scratch takes much longer than a mere two years, and many further individuals and institutions helped decisively along the way. Funders, without whose support this book could not have been written by this, since then, precariously and intermittently employed author, must be acknowledged: these include the Association of Art Historians, the Paul Mellon Foundation, the Centre for Privacy Studies at the University of Copenhagen headed by Professor Mette Birkedal Bruun, the Nordea Foundation and the Attingham Trust. I would also like to acknowledge the generous help and support of Thomas Lyngby and Mette Skovgaard at The Museum of National History at Frederiksborg Castle; Mette Birkedal Bruun and Maj Riis Poulsen at the Centre for Privacy Studies at the University of Copenhagen; Catharine MacLeod at the National Portrait Gallery; Walter Melion, Erika Gaffney and Rebeccah Williams at Lund Humphries (and their anonymous, incisive reviewer); and the many kind and knowledgeable curators, librarians and archivists of the Royal Collection Trust, the National Portrait Gallery, the British Library (especially Pardaad Chamsaz), the National Archives at Kew, the Danish State Archives, the Danish National Art Library, the Danish Royal Library, Rosenborg Palace, Copenhagen (especially Peter Kristiansen), Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Nationalmuseum Stockholm (especially Eva-Lena Karlsson), and the Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv in Germany. I am especially and immensely grateful for the unstinting intellectual mentorship and friendship of Charlotte Christensen and Paul Douglas Lockhart, and for the informal help and advice shared by scholars including Michael Hatt, Jamie Masters, Christina Strunck, Gwen Yarker and Mara Wade. There were many more recommendations of books and articles, sharing of contacts and ideas, from so many, to whose generosity I am likewise indebted. Journals, The Court Historian, The Journal of the Historians of Netherlandish Art, the Oxford Art Journal and the Burlington Magazine, gave me opportunities to publish articles trialling the ideas governing this book’s narrative arc and theoretical premises. I am thankful to the reviewers and the editors of these publications for their generosity and their patience, especially Jonathan Spangler, Dagmar Eichberger and Katie Scott. Likewise, I was very grateful for the opportunity to share my thinking, as this took shape in fits and starts, at many conferences, seminars and symposia, especially those organised by the Society for Court Studies, the Centre for Privacy Studies at the University of Copenhagen, Elettra Carbone at the Department for Scandinavian Studies at University College London, the Renaissance Society of America, and the Wallace Collection, London. Anne Byrne, Melissa Gustin, Nicola Imrie and Catriona Murray read bits and pieces of the manuscript and offered hugely valuable feedback. During lockdown, when archives and libraries were closed, many generous authors sent me copies of their necessary, published work by email and even by post from Los Angeles (Professor David Kunzle). The Royal Collection Trust, the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, the National Library of Sweden, Stockholm, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen, the Louvre, Paris, Wellcome Collection, London, Milwaukee Art Museum, Rosenborg Palace, Copenhagen, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the Danish Royal Library, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen and Bishopsgate Library, London have kindly allowed me to reproduce images from their collections without charge, for which I am forever grateful. Finally, I would like to thank my lovely cat-sitting clients, who allowed me to stretch my research funding so far beyond its limits. Friends and cats helped me to maintain my sanity throughout, amongst whom Lea Evans Bent and Valerie deserve the most special mentions.

Introduction

This is a book whose start and end points converge upon a portrait of Anna of Denmark (1574–1619) (fig.1). When I first stepped into the periphery of this sizeable portrait, it was – and remains – as arresting and as powerful as any portrait I had ever encountered. I was struck by its overwhelming historical alterity, the sheer distance of time separating me from the moment of its making. I was viscerally aware that I was not equipped to ‘see’ this portrait in the manner of its contemporary beholders, nor to understand its significance on its own terms. I knew I was looking at something completely new to me, even so old as it was.¹ Something about the portrait’s air felt decidedly uncanny, as if it were a relic of some important but forgotten thing.

The embodiment materialised for Anna of Denmark, queen consort to James VI of Scotland and I of England and Ireland (1566–1625), via this portrait, is no longer available to women in the present. Perhaps this is why its painted presence felt to me like a haunting. Without the direction supplied by the portrait’s contemporary theoretical framework, Anna of Denmark’s very physical, very public prestige is oddly difficult to see from the vantage point of the present moment. Especially, Anna’s stance with her elbow akimbo is often noted as failing to conform with what are nowadays commonly regarded as the strictly enforced gender norms of the patriarchal past.² This perceived failure has led to evaluations of the portrait as private and familial, as prideful, as a public statement of Anna’s independence from her husband, or as simply not very good.³

Such evaluations take Anna of Denmark’s gender – her femininity, or perceived lack thereof – as their starting point. But, at the time of this portrait’s making, Anna would have been seen first and foremost as a queen. This constitutes a subtle, but crucial, difference between the way we understand ourselves and one another today and how people understood and saw themselves in relation to one another in the early modern period.

The model of embodiment imaged in Anna’s portrait was the product of a paradigm, now obsolete, that placed rank, not gender, as the foremost, foundational unit of elite female identity. Accordingly, Anna’s portrait weaves a narrative, not of femininity, but of royal blood tinctured with divine inspiration. Anna’s body is presented in her portrait as a rich medium carefully inscribed by the practice of hunting, and intertwining themes of dynastic and artistic generation.⁴

As I will argue in the first chapter of this book, Anna’s portrait was addressed to her son, Charles, then Prince of Wales (1600–1649). It functioned as a model, or an exemplary mirror, for his emulation, or self-recognition. Charles would respond to this portrait’s influence during his reign as King Charles I, drawing upon and re-envisioning its citational framework in his own royal hunting portrait by Anthony Van Dyck of 1635, now in the Louvre, Paris. Anna’s femaleness presented no barrier to her presentation as the mould for the casting of a crown prince. As I will show during the course of this book, in all kinds of ways, the skeins of art-making and the making of dynasties were tightly braided. This braiding privileged the quality of blood over the limitations of gender. Indeed, gender itself was at this time not yet perceived to be quite so fixed and concrete as blood rank. Since then, over time, these positions have reversed.

Fluidity characterises the natural philosophy of the early modern body.⁵ At the time of this portrait’s making, mind and body were not dual entities, but merged within the psychophysical entity that then comprised the self. The microcosm of the human body constituted a mirror in miniature for the macrocosm of the larger world.⁶ Microcosm and macrocosm did not exist separately, but as part of the same material continuum. As such, not only food, air and water, but images, ideas, sounds – all the rich, sensory experience of being a body fully embedded in the world – interacted with agency to shape and influence the early modern self. By responding thoughtfully and deliberately to the myriad influences of the mutable, clamorous, material world upon this plastic, porous psychophysical self, the individual cultivated a refined, balanced embodiment.

The person of rank, born of a rarefied genealogy and carefully shaped by their education, was well placed to perfect an embodiment that could equal, even exceed, its very best exemplars. This embodiment was refracted through processes of composition, or self-fashioning, always ongoing and never finished, a transformative succession of creative enfleshments.⁷ Anna of Denmark’s body in her portrait represents a point of convergence between flesh as precious medium and form as artful self-fashioning. Her portrait, to coin Pamela H. Smith’s phrase, presents us with a doubly artisanal embodiment.⁸

1 Paul van Somer, Anne of Denmark (1617), oil on canvas, 265.5 × 209 cm, Royal Collection Trust.

I studied Anna’s portrait while working on a project about Danish-British consort portraiture hosted at the National Portrait Gallery, London. Here, I also examined portraits of subsequent Danish and British holders of the office of queen or prince consort in Denmark-Norway and Britain: George of Denmark (1653–1708), Louisa of Great Britain (1724–1751), Caroline Matilda of Great Britain (1751–1775) and Alexandra of Denmark (1844–1925).

Each consort sat to important artists and was immortalised in variously intriguing images. As my work progressed, I came to realise that the likenesses of these subsequent consorts, so evenly situated at regular intervals across the span of 300 years of history, did not tell a story plotted on an upwards curve. Instead of an ongoing celebration of the consort and the consort portrait as twin works of art, the one cast in an alloy of noble blood and the other in skill and paint, I found attrition and encroaching limitations.

In the early 1600s, Anna of Denmark acted as a commissioner of art capable of expanding the possibilities of the visual field. In the 1900s, Alexandra of Denmark’s image is charged with a very different task. Her portraits and their reception reveal the impossibly contradictory demands made of the commodified female body under biopolitical patriarchy: that is, to perform a virtuous, conforming modesty while simultaneously purveying a compelling self-representation within the social image-realm. Three hundred years separates the making of these consorts’ images. The rift between them shows that the body in history is neither permanent nor perpetual, but provisional according to its context. It re-materialises in new incarnations, or modes of enfleshment, within specific historic conditions. Such changes are accompanied by changes in the modes of the body’s perception. As these modes change, so do the conditions of possibility for the body’s significance and agency, and consequently, for the possibilities of its portrayal.

As this story unfolds, I will show how the transfer of significance from rank to gender as her most important identifying attribute came to drain the almost supernatural agency from the body of the royal consort conceived as a work of art. This would entail the devaluation of the hitherto very fleshly, public and prestigious royal embodiment materialised in Anna’s hunting portrait, and the consort’s dissolution into an infinite mist of ephemeral imagery.

Consequently, this book both is and is not a chronological survey of the portraiture of five Danish-British consorts. On the one hand, their portraiture is sequentially examined within the pages that follow. On the other hand, this book seeks to go a little further than would an iconographic survey, or a series of illustrated biographies. It seeks to trace the long history of a transformation in the art of embodiment in the royal image and of its beholding.

This transformation is threaded through a lively tale of dynastic and cultural exchange. The House of Oldenburg, which has dominated the conglomerate state of Denmark since 1448, made no fewer than five dynastic unions between its princes and princesses, and those of the houses of Stuart and Hanover, across the three centuries that followed. Of the Stuarts, Margaret of Denmark (1456–1486) wed James III of Scotland (1452–1488) in 1469;⁹ in 1589 Anna of Denmark wed James VI of Scotland, later also James I of England and Ireland. George of Denmark wed Princess Anne, later Anne, Queen of Great Britain (1665–1714) in 1683. He is the sole male consort considered in this study. Of the Hanoverians, Frederick V of Denmark-Norway (1723–1766) and Louisa of Great Britain were married in 1743; and Christian VII of Denmark-Norway (1749–1808) wed Caroline Matilda of Great Britain in 1766.

Almost a century then elapsed before Alexandra of Denmark, a princess of the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, a cadet branch of the House of Oldenburg, married the eldest son of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert Edward of Wales (1841–1910). Their wedding at Windsor took place in March 1863, the same year that Alexandra’s father succeeded as Christian IX of Denmark and assumed leadership of a renewed House of Oldenburg.¹⁰

Genealogies, within art-making and within dynasties, are not straightforwardly linear. Lines branch out and then double back to the stem. Likewise, I would like to situate Anna’s hunting portrait, which I address in the first chapter, as the reverse-ending, or perhaps the stem, of this book. As the point of conclusion, Anna’s hunting portrait will accompany us throughout, acting as a precedent and as a comparator. Instead of moving forwards through history, progressively, away from Anna’s portrait, we will move backwards, our gaze fixed on Anna’s portrait in the manner of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History:

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.¹¹

By blasting our series of consort portraits out of the continuum of history I will seek to record what was lost, rather than accumulated, during the course of this history. This will be undertaken not for the purposes of mourning, but of restitution.

STRUCTURE OF THIS BOOK

In this section of the introduction, I will set out the overall structure of the book. Then, in two further sections, I will outline the framework, historical and theoretical, that supports this structure and my methods. This book’s five consecutive chapters are devoted to the five consorts and are given in chronological sequence. I will give brief biographical details for each consort here, alongside a summary of the content forthcoming, since each chapter focuses tightly on the consorts’ images and their immediate visual-cultural context.

As yet, there is no overarching Anglophone historiography dedicated to the diplomatic and cultural context that shaped the dynastic unions between Britain and Denmark-Norway across this long period, despite the richness of court archives and collections in both countries.¹² This book, in its narrow focus on the intertwining histories of the royal portrait and royal embodiment, does not seek to remedy this. There is a wealth of fascinating scholarship traversing this long history, which I cite throughout.

Between 1536 and 1660, Denmark-Norway was second only to the Spanish Empire in terms of its land mass. Denmark (henceforth) was also Europe’s first officially Protestant kingdom.¹³ At its height under Frederick II, the father of Anna of Denmark, the territories ruled by the House of Oldenburg included the Kingdom of Denmark, which included the counties spanning the Øresund, or, by its English name, the Sound. Today, this designates the narrow body of water separating Denmark and contemporary Sweden. Then, the lands either side were Danish territory. Denmark also included the Kingdom of Norway, which remained in union with Denmark after the dissolution of Kalmar in 1523, and its dependencies in the North Atlantic: the Faroe Islands, Iceland and Greenland.

Early modern Denmark extended south into contemporary Germany.¹⁴ The king of Denmark was also the duke of Schleswig and, from the early 16th century, count of Holstein. Holstein, as a member of the Holy Roman Empire, gave the Danish king certain rights as an imperial prince, notably a vote in the Imperial Diet, the deliberative body of the Holy Roman Empire. Between 1667 and 1773, the king of Denmark was also count of Oldenburg, which gave him another vote in the Diet, as well as another border with the Electorate of Hanover – a significant link with the ruling dynasty of Great Britain that should not be overlooked.¹⁵ In the 17th and 18th centuries, Denmark also acquired territories on the African ‘Gold Coast’ (present day Ghana), in the Caribbean (St Thomas, St Croix, St John), and at Tranquebar, Serampore and the Nicobar Islands in South Asia.¹⁶

The status of the early modern Danish court was reflected in its cultural sophistication. The Danish court was outward facing, multilingual, literate in the arts and sciences, cosmopolitan and mobile. Control of the Sound gave Denmark a natural geopolitical advantage and a lucrative income stream, allowing it to impose duties on the Baltic trades that were the lifeblood of the northern maritime states. While from the early 17th century onwards Denmark’s borders were eroded by a successive series of calamitous conflicts, its strategic significance within Northern Europe remained undiminished for centuries. By the time Alexandra landed on British shores for her wedding in 1863, from a Denmark much reduced as a territorial entity, the long dynastic heritage shared between Britain’s and Denmark’s royal houses heightened her prestige and her riotous public welcome.

Anna of Denmark

The reign of Frederick II of Denmark-Norway (1534–1588), father of Anna of Denmark, represents in many respects the pinnacle of Oldenburg wealth, power and influence. Anna of Denmark was born on 12 December 1574 in the palace of Skanderborg, Denmark. She was the second daughter of Frederick and his wife, Sophie of Mecklenburg-Güstrow (1557–1631). Anna was married in person in Oslo to James VI of Scotland and I of England and Ireland on 23 November 1589, a proxy marriage having taken place at Kronborg Castle on 20 August. The pair ascended to the throne of England in 1603, on the death of Queen Elizabeth I of England and Ireland (1533–1603). Anna had ten pregnancies during her marriage, but only two of her children survived into maturity: Elizabeth Stuart (1596–1662), Electress of the Palatinate and briefly Queen of Bohemia, and Charles I (1600–1649), King of England, Scotland and Ireland.

Anna of Denmark is perhaps the most charismatic and in recent years certainly the best studied Danish-British consort following decades of rather less than benign neglect. A blossoming of recent scholarship coinciding with the quatercentenary of Anna’s death in 1619 has focused on her political agency, often filtered through her commissioning and collecting, the display of her portrait collections and inventories of her palaces and wardrobe.¹⁷ This scholarship has shown definitively that Anna’s patronage was deeply inflected by court politics and responsive to cultural developments taking place across continental Europe.

Chapter 1 focuses on Anna’s emblematic hunting portrait. Her portrait forms part of an ongoing process of self-fashioning and becoming, shaping the fine materials of Anna’s dynastic inheritance by means of her talent and wit. As such, the portrait presents the queen as both an artwork of her own creation and as a pattern for rulership. This pattern, I argue, was specifically addressed to her son, Charles, then Prince of Wales. Charles I’s own hunting portrait by Anthony Van Dyck (1635) can be productively read as a painted response to his mother’s, as the perfection of the template for rulership that her portrait provides.

The visual and textual culture of the courtly hunt forms the ground upon which these transactions between mother and son, queen and future king, were made. Reading deeply into this culture allows us to enter into all the rich allusiveness of these auratic, emblematic portraits.

The portrayal of the body of rank in these and other portraits of the period confront us with a dynastic, genealogical model of embodiment, whose blood inheritance exceeds and precedes all other aspects of identity. In the portrait gallery, artistic and dynastic generation merged with synergy. Artists and commissioners of this period were very aware of the agency of the objects they caused to be made. The agency of portraits – and of queenly mothers – was generative and directive, penetrating and shaping the flesh and forms of their beholding subjects. As the following chapter demonstrates, Anna’s portrait continued to impress both viewers and other objects with its significant form well into the Stuart Restoration.

George of Denmark

In an attempt to reforge this successful dynastic alliance between the two northern Protestant monarchies, the niece of Charles II, King of Scotland, England and Ireland (1630–1685), and Anna’s great-granddaughter and namesake, Princess Anne of York (1665–1714), was married in 1683 to Anna’s great-nephew, Prince George of Denmark, the youngest son of Frederick III of Denmark-Norway (1609–1670). On Anne’s accession to the throne as Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland in 1702, Prince George of Denmark became the British queen’s consort.¹⁸ The prince consort’s early experiences matched those of many female consorts in that his Danish retinue was shipped back to Denmark at the earliest opportunity and members of