In 1889 the NGV’s Trustees asked the Governor of Victoria, Sir Henry Loch, during a visit he was making to England, to enquire whether Queen Victoria would sit for a portrait to be commissioned by the NGV. Hubert Herkomer was suggested for this task, or any other artist of her choice. The Queen declined to sit for Herkomer, so instead Sir Henry Loch proposed that a Jubilee portrait of the monarch be copied instead.1Edmund La Touche Armstrong, The Book of the Public Library, Museums, and National Gallery of Victoria. 1856–1906, Ford & Son, Melbourne, 1906, p. 60. It was likely that Loch was referring to the official State portrait that Queen Victoria had commissioned in 1885 from one of her favourite artists, Heinrich von Angeli (Royal Collection Trust, London, RCIN 403405). Had Herkomer worked from this portrait by von Angeli, he would have only been one step removed from the sitter, painting from a likeness for which the Queen herself had posed.
At a subsequent NGV Trustee Committee meeting on 26 June 1889, it was reported that Herkomer, by way of a cablegram, had declined to copy von Angeli’s picture. He instead suggested to work from Alfred Gilbert’s Jubilee Memorial to Queen Victoria, a life-size bronze portrait of the monarch in her Robe of State created for the town of Winchester in 1887.2Annette Dixon research papers, National Gallery of Victoria. The Trustees agreed to this proposal, and a price of 600 guineas was settled upon for Herkomer’s commission.
Gilbert had worked from photographs of the Queen in preparing his Jubilee memorial portrait and so by employing the sculpture as his model, Herkomer was burdening himself with an additional handicap, working from a sculpture that itself was created using second-hand images of the monarch. On 18 April 1891 the Melbourne Leader noted, however, that
the work is now being carried out from the most approved statue, and by means of occasional sittings granted by her Majesty. The price agreed upon had been 600 guineas, but at a meeting of the trustees held on 15th inst. an application was made by the artist to increase the amount to 900 guineas. This request, after consideration, was granted.3‘The Town’, The Leader, 18 Apr. 1891, p. 29. At the end of November that year Australian newspapers reported that the portrait was completed and ready for shipping to Melbourne. ‘Pictures for the Melbourne National Gallery’, The Argus, 30 Nov. 1891, p. 5.
Herkomer’s biographer Saxon Mills published a telegram sent to Herkomer by Queen Victoria’s daughter Princess Louise, Marchioness of Lorne, on 2 December 1892:
The Queen would much like to look at your picture of herself. Can you possibly bring it tomorrow (Saturday)? To enable you to see Her Majesty you had better leave Paddington at 12.15.
From this Saxon Mills concluded that although
he had painted the portrait mainly from a public statue … Princess Louise, however, had so far helped Herkomer as to obtain for him an invitation to take tea with the Queen, so that he might gather some more direct and personal impressions. Herkomer used to tell how Her Majesty expressed to him a humorous fear that the tea had ‘made her nose red’.4J. Saxon Mills, Life and Letters of Sir Hubert Herkomer, Hutchinson & Co., London, 1923, pp. 203-4. A regional Victorian newspaper reported how ‘her Majesty, it appears, declines as a rule to sit for her portrait, but on this occasion – as a complement to the colony which bears her name – gave the artist a special sitting’. The Mount Alexander Mail, 6 Sept. 1892, p. 2.
While Queen Victoria may have declined to sit formally for Herkomer, Princess Louise’s telegram does suggest that she was interested to see his finished likeness of herself. It must have been a photograph of the painting that the artist was requested to bring to her in December 1892, the painting having been installed in Melbourne the previous February. Or he could have brought an etching of his painting, for apparently he had made an intaglio print after the portrait was completed and before it was shipped to Melbourne in February 1892.5According to Annette Dixon, former Curator, NGV, approval was given for Herkomer’s etching on 17 Dec. 1891 (the National Gallery of Victoria holding copyright on the painting). A copy of his etching was subsequently presented to the National Gallery of Victoria and was placed on display with the painting in 1893. Annette Dixon research papers, National Gallery of Victoria. This etching cannot be located today. Queen Victoria was reported to have viewed Herkomer’s portrait a year earlier, however, on 3 December 1891, supposedly the day after the painting’s completion.6‘Agent-general of Victoria accounts’, 2 Dec. 1891, PROV 5873/1. As noted above, however, Australian newspapers reported the portrait competed in late November 1891. Her diaries mention neither viewing.
Gilbert’s Jubilee memorial sculpture was richly surfaced, showing the Queen’s ‘gorgeous textured robes of state, the profusion of realistic details such as the Order of the Garter, the Koh-i-Noor diamond, and her awesome bracelet and apparently bejeweled sceptre’.7Richard Dorment, Alfred Gilbert. Sculptor and Goldsmith, Royal Academy of Arts and Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1986, pp. 126–7. See also Richard Dorment, Alfred Gilbert, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1985, pp. 72–7. Herkomer transferred all these details into his portrait, although the ruched décolletage of the Monarch’s dress given by Gilbert was replaced in the painting with a more modest expanse of flat lace. Gilbert’s statue was cast in bronze, topped with a suspended crown fashioned from gold-painted beaten metal. Herkomer painted the Queen as though from life, while transforming the throne within which she is enshrined from Gilbert’s bronze into a shining gilded and enameled surround.
On its arrival in Melbourne the painting was not well received. Noting that the portrait had its origins in Gilbert’s statue, the critic for the Age (1892) argued that ‘whatever this arrangement might have been in the statue, it is hardly a happy one in the picture’. The Age felt that the accumulation of detail of clothing and accoutrements in Herkomer’s composition made it almost impossible for the viewer to focus on the Queen’s face. Furthermore:
The general impression conveyed is of one singularly unblessed by nature to impersonate the emblems which surround her, and whatever the secret opinions of the artist may have been, one may be sure that this was not the one he intended to communicate. The face has not enough character to render it interesting as a realistic portrait, like Velasquez’s or Holbein’s immortal representations of royal personages, in which one reads the dominant passions and characteristics of a whole race. And while it lacks in human, individual interest, Mr. Herkomer’s portrait does not convey any abstract idea of majesty. Therefore little remains to save it from being commonplace but the workmanship.8‘Art notes’, The Age, 29 Feb. 1892, p. 7. Article reprinted in its entirety in The Leader, 5 Mar. 1892, p. 35. It has been previously noted that ‘The portrait of Queen Victoria was shipped to Melbourne in early 1892, but for reasons still not clear, the new NGV Director, Bernard Hall, did not hang it until September 1893’. Gerard Vaughan, ‘The cult of the queen empress: royal portraiture in colonial Victoria’, Art Journal of the National Gallery of Victoria, no. 50, 2011, p. 38. This article from The Age, however, states that in at the end of February 1892 Herkomer’s portrait ‘is now hung at the extreme end of the National Gallery, in the centre of the wall’.
The Melbourne weekly magazine Table Talk (1892) lamented that
Professor Herkomer’s portrait of Queen Victoria has been hung in the National Gallery in a position of honour certainly, but in the worst possible light. The bad light, the fact that the pose of the portrait and the arrangement of the draperies is taken from Gilbert’s bronze statue, and that £900 has been paid for the painting, all detract from its merits … The technique is very clever … The face is correct enough in outline, and bears the impression of portraiture, but it has very little life expression and the colouring is that of the palette, not of nature … The picture, as a scholastic production, is worthy of admiration, but it lacks those subtle touches which make the difference between artistic genius and artistic study.9‘Art and artists. The new pictures at the National Gallery’, Table Talk, 4 Mar. 1892, p. 13.
A critic for The Sydney Mail (1892) defended the painting, however, noting that:
The difficulty of pleasing all the world … is strikingly illustrated by some grumbling letters that have appeared about the latest addition to our national collection of pictures. Herkomer’s picture of her Majesty is more generally approved of by our artists than by the public. I could not imagine a better portrait of an aged woman who has not height to give her dignity. The portrait is placed in front of a curtained recess at the top of the chief room in our National Gallery, and has been attracting more or less critical crowds and provoking a great deal of comment since its arrival.10Viva, ‘Melbourne gossip’, The Sydney Mail and New South Wales Advertiser, 26 Mar. 1892, p. 690.
Despite the support from The Sydney Mail, criticism of Herkomer’s portrait continued to mount. The Leader delivered a broadside in September 1892. Noting that ‘the color is peculiar, raw and vulgar, the drawing bad, notably in the right arm, and the painting is loose and careless’, it proceeded to state that:
It is a foolish thing for Mr Herkomer to caricature another man’s work, and it is a crying injustice to the people of Victoria to have such a thing foisted upon them.11Artist, ‘Fine arts. Our National Gallery’, The Leader, 24 Sept. 1892, p. 32.
In 1900 NGV Director Bernard Hall, when assessing the Gallery’s collections, dismissed Herkomer’s portrait as an ‘expensive failure’.12Leonard B. Cox, The National Gallery of Victoria 1861 to 1968. A Search for a Collection, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1968, p. 56. That Herkomer himself was dissatisfied with his depiction of Queen Victoria may explain why the artist never mentioned this painting in his autobiographical writings; nor was it mentioned in his first major biography, published by Baldry in 1901.13Sir Hubert von Herkomer, The Herkomers, Macmillan and Co., London, 1910 (vol. 1) and 1911 (vol. 2); A. L. Baldry, Hubert von Herkomer R. A.: A Study and a Biography, George Bell and Sons, London, 1901. Herkomer was aware of the problems inherent with the public reception of portraits of well-known subjects, musing on the fact that
It will be said that a portrait should above all be ‘truthful’; that there must be no mistake as to the identity of the individual represented. That is the fundamental idea. But truth, or truthfulness, in the matter of mere ‘likeness’, cannot be said to be the whole art of portraiture. Paradoxical as it may sound, a portrait may be like, and yet not life-like, and contrariwise, it may be life-like, yet not like. Again, a portrait devoid of all claims to art can be an excellent likeness; it may also be said on the other side that a fine piece of painting may be devoid of that particular likeness which makes it recognizable by people who are unable to appreciate the art technique.14ibid., vol. 2, pp. 122–3.
Now, more than 120 years since this portrait’s arrival in Melbourne, when its supposed likeness to Queen Victoria is no longer such an issue, Herkomer’s portrait can be appreciated on its own merits for its delicate coloration and fluid, luscious brushwork.
Ted Gott, Senior Curator, International Art, National Gallery of Victoria
