Queen Victoria's Family: The Grandmother of Europe

Photography and Victoria grew up together. When Roger Fenton photographed the royal family in 1854, the medium was fifteen years old; so was the marriage at the heart of it. These sixteen photographs, gathered from public archives, follow one family from that first sitting to the funeral procession of 1901: nine children on a terrace at Osborne, portrait cards printed and shared by the hundreds of thousands, a widow in black for forty years, and grandchildren who would sit on the thrones of Britain, Germany, Russia and Spain. The baby in her arms in 1859 led Germany to war against her other grandchildren in 1914. Every photograph is shown as it survives; where a face or date is uncertain, the plaque says so.