It was no coincidence that in 1861 the National Gallery of Victoria was officially opened by the governor, Sir Henry Barkly, on Queen Victoria’s birthday, 24 May.¹ Designated at the time the Melbourne Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Victoria Act, 1869, gave the institution its new name. Nor was it a coincidence that, when, fourteen years later, the first of the growing institution’s purpose-built picture galleries was opened, 24 May was also chosen.

The new self-governing colony of Victoria, established as a political entity separate from New South Wales in 1851, had quickly become – largely due to the discovery of gold – one of the wealthiest parts of the Empire; the colonial British establishment which controlled agriculture, commerce and politics in the colony named after Queen Victoria was fiercely proud of its achievements, and this was expressed in a deep sense of national pride, with the monarch and the royal family the symbolic focus of their patriotic fervour.

In the nearly forty years which elapsed from the founding of the NGV until the death of Queen Victoria on 22 January 1901, many works of art representing the queen and the royal family – ranging from painted and sculpted portraits, to narrative pictures representing major royal events – were acquired by the NGV, or exhibited in Melbourne as much admired loan items. In addition, other major portraits of the queen were acquired for public venues such as Parliament House and Government House, and a group of monumental statues of Queen Victoria were erected in Melbourne and other cities in what had just become the new state of Victoria, following her death in 1901.²Queen Victoria died just three weeks after the new nation of Australia became a political reality (1 January 1901), having signed the Constitution of Australia Act on 9 July 1900. The aim of this essay is to document this process, and to recreate – since many of the most important items have been disposed of, and subsequently damaged or destroyed through neglect – the iconography of royal portraiture in colonial Victoria.

The earliest evidence of a royal portrait being exhibited at the NGV comes from a series of photographs of around 1872, (fig. 1) representing the first hang of pictures and sculpture in the temporary gallery, before the opening of a much grander picture gallery (later named the McArthur Gallery) in 1875. The bust of Queen Victoria is identical to the general design and form of the colossal bust of the queen by Matthew Noble, commissioned for the Manchester Town Hall and unveiled in 1856.³It was conceived as a memento of the queen’s visit to Manchester in 1851; the donor hoped that it would in due course inspire a full-size statue of the queen, and it is recorded that in 1857 Prince Albert unveiled a statue of the queen by Noble in Salford, near Manchester (see Jonathon Marsden (ed.), Victoria & Albert: Art & Love, Royal Collection Publications, London, 2010, p. 129). The bust (for which Queen Victoria sat at Buckingham Palace, an unusual privilege as she usually declined such requests) inspired a large number of replicas and copies on a smaller scale. While the Noble bust appears in some of the NGV’s early inventories and catalogues, references disappear from the end of the nineteenth century; it is no longer held in the collection but there is no record of its disposal.

The next royal portrait to enter the collection was Charles Summers’s bust of the queen’s second son, Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, gifted in 1873 by Abraham Linacre. ⁴See Catalogue of the Statues and Busts in Marble and Casts in the National Gallery of Victoria, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1880, p. 3. Deaccessioned under Daryl Lindsay in 1943, the bust was disposed of at the Leonard Joel auction (held on the NGV premises) of 18 May 1943; purchased by ‘Spencer’ (see Ken Scarlett, Australian Sculptors, Thomas Nelson, Melbourne, 1980, p. 624). Summers’s marble bust of the Duke of Edinburgh was sent by the artist from Rome to the Royal Academy in 1873. There is no documentary evidence to establish whether Abraham Linacre purchased the bust exhibited at the RA, or instead commissioned a replica from Summers’s studio in Rome. Given the date of the gift to Melbourne of 1873, the former is more likely. The Duke of Edinburgh was the only member of the royal family to visit Australia in the nineteenth century, spending the period November 1867 – January 1868 in Victoria. It is recorded that the Trustees of the Public Library and National Gallery gave the duke bound copies of the NGV collection, as it then existed, for the queen, the princess royal and the Princess of Wales. The much publicised and deeply embarrassing assassination attempt upon him while in Sydney assured not only a certain notoriety, but also strong public affection leading, for example, to the establishment of major new hospitals in Melbourne and Sydney, largely paid for by public subscription, bearing his name. The bust of Prince Alfred, in common with a large number of other significant Victorian pictures and statues in the NGV collection, was deemed no longer relevant to the collection purposes of the NGV, and was deaccessioned and sold in 1943. Its present whereabouts is unknown.

An even worse fate, however, had already befallen the most important group of royal portraits in colonial Australia, Charles Summers’s four monumental Carrara marble statues of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and the Prince and Princess of Wales (later Edward VII and Queen Alexandra) gifted to the NGV by William J. Clarke in 1878. These statues had been deaccessioned (by Order of the Governor-in-Council) in October 1941, in the first year of Daryl Lindsay’s directorship,⁵ However, the minutes of the executive committee for the National Gallery of Victoria of 27 February 1941 recorded that an order-in-council be requested to ‘sell or dispose of certain pictures and sculptures’. Daryl Lindsay was formally appointed director on 26 March 1941, but it can be assumed that in the preceding months (given his predecessor’s illness and total alienation from the board) he was already advising council president Keith Murdoch on policy. The Annual Report, 1941, p. 3, noted the transforming effect of acquisitions through the Felton Bequest: ‘As a consequence there have accumulated in the vaults a number of pictures and statuary whose standard does not qualify them for exhibition, and which are unsuitable even for loan purposes. A tentative list was submitted by the Director of such exhibits’. Daryl Lindsay’s abhorrence of Victorian art and taste is well documented, but in proposing the deaccession of Victoriana he also reflected similar processes in Europe and North America. as permanent gifts to a group of public entities, leading in due course – through lack of care – to their effective destruction. William Clarke’s donation of the four royal portraits was considered at the time one of the most important events in the NGV’s still short history, and a source of huge pride for the citizens of Melbourne fig. 2).

The commissioning of these major works was an important milestone in the development of taste and patronage in the colony, bringing together the wealthiest landowner in Australia, the talented sculptor who had dominated Melbourne’s art scene in the 1850s and 1860s, and had returned to Europe to establish a successful studio in Rome, and the fledgling National Gallery of Victoria, with which both Clarke and Summers were involved.

Charles Summers arrived in the colony in 1852, accompanied by his brothers Eli and Albert.⁶On Summers see esp. Margaret Thomas, A Hero of the Workshop and a Somersetshire Worthy, Charles Summers, Sculptor, Hamilton, London, 1879; and the outstanding entry in Scarlett, Australian Sculptors, pp. 621–31. As they immediately travelled to the gold diggings in central Victoria, it can be presumed that the lure of gold was paramount, although there is also evidence to suggest that a warmer climate had been advised due to his poor health. Summers became a liked and well-known figure in colonial society, sculpting busts of eminent citizens as his principal source of income, but from time to time receiving important public commissions such as the heroically sized bronze monument to the ill-fated explorers Burke and Wills, completed in 1865, by far the largest and technically most ambitious bronze yet cast in Australia. It can be assumed that William Clarke and Charles Summers had known each other for some time, given Clarke’s increasing involvement in civic affairs, culminating in his prestigious chairmanship of Melbourne’s International Exhibition in 1880, and the fact that Summers, too – notwithstanding his vastly different social and financial position – threw himself into civic cultural organisations, becoming a founder member of the Victorian Society of Fine Arts in 1856, and first President of the Victorian Academy of Fine Arts in 1861, the year the NGV was founded, and with which he was closely involved in its early years.

Throughout the nineteenth century, Rome continued to be regarded as the international centre of sculptural training and production, and every sculptor of talent aspired to work there. It housed a huge international community of sculptors, with the extensive British colony acknowledging the pre-eminence of John Gibson, who lived and worked in the city from 1817 to his death in 1866.

One of the aims of the three Summers brothers in travelling to the Victorian gold fields in 1852 was ‘to seek sufficient gold to enable them to return to Rome, independent of kind patrons’ favours’.⁷See the obituary of Charles Summers’s brother Eli, published in the Tarnagulla and Llanelly Courier (a typescript of an undated obituary, given to Ken Scarlett, who deposited a copy in the NGV Library), which makes it clear the information had come from Eli Summers’s daughter and her husband, Rev. J. B. Sharp. It can be presumed that this remained a constant desideratum, and in 1867 – two years after the successful completion of the Burke and Wills statue in Melbourne – Charles Summers left Melbourne and returned to London, en route to Rome, where he established a studio at the heart of the sculptors’ quarter, in the via Margutta, near the Spanish Steps. It was hardly surprising, then, that when the immensely rich William Clarke, and his new second wife Janet (née Snodgrass) arrived in Rome in 1875, they established contact with Summers. The previous years had been momentous for Clarke. His father, William ‘Big’ Clarke, larger-than-life and notoriously unsophisticated in manners, having come from the poorest of rural backgrounds in Somerset, had died the previous year, leaving a total fortune estimated at around £5–6 million, making him one of the richest men in the Empire. His sons, William and Joseph, both established in Melbourne, inherited the bulk of it. In the previous year, 1873, William Clarke had married his children’s 21-year-old governess, Janet Snodgrass, who was forced to work because of her father’s financial misfortunes. She was, though, of good family, with senior British Army connections; and her cousin Ada Ryan was soon to marry a younger son of the Duke of Buccleuch, a connection of huge import in Melbourne’s colonial society. Clarke’s first wife, Mary Walker, had recently died as the result of a miscarriage occasioned by a carriage accident, in which Janet was involved. William and Janet had signed-off the plans for their elaborate new house, Rupertswood, at Sunbury to the north of Melbourne, and in late 1874 left for Europe, well able to outlay considerable sums of money in the capitals of Europe on items with which to furnish their new mansion.

Some time either in 1875, or on their return visit to Rome in 1876, the Clarkes devised the project for Summers to sculpt four large statues of the royal family – Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and the Prince and Princess of Wales – for presentation to the NGV in Melbourne. It was the perfect plan. The Clarkes had almost limitless funds at their disposal, and their intended gift to Melbourne would bring with it the kudos of an implied association with royalty, ensuring that the commission would be seen as a deeply patriotic gesture. It is likely that a magnificent public gift like this was seen by the Clarkes themselves as a further step in their ‘capture’ of Melbourne society, leading ultimately to the creation in 1882 of a hereditary baronetcy for William Clarke, the first to be conferred on a member of Victoria’s new colonial establishment.

It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Charles Summers, representing the most ambitious and valuable commission he was ever to receive. Furthermore, in the context of desirable subjects, a suite of royal portraits on this scale was guaranteed to elevate his reputation both in London and Melbourne.⁸Following Summers’s sudden death in Paris in November 1878, en route to London and then Melbourne for the installation of the statues at the NGV, London’s Art Journal published a short notice; the only works specifically identified were the royal portraits (see Art Journal, February 1879, p. 12). Summers spent eight months in London, researching and preparing the concept, awaiting the queen’s final approval of the designs. We also know from William Clarke’s speech on the occasion of his formal presentation of the statues to the NGV, that Sir Redmond Barry, Chairman of the combined Council of Trustees of the Public Library and National Gallery, had personally expended a great deal of effort to obtain these approvals.⁹See Thomas, section 2, p. 14, which reproduces the transcript of the speeches on the occasion of the formal presentation by William J. Clarke, as published by the Argus, November 1878. It can be assumed that the proposal to include the queen’s late husband, and her eldest son and daughter-in-law, was calculated to win her approval, and the problem of how coherently to represent the individuals in 1876–77 – given that Prince Albert had died in December 1861 – was solved by choosing to represent the figures as they would have looked around 1860.¹⁰As the Prince and Princess of Wales did not marry until 1863 (the first major royal event permitted by the queen after the death of the Prince Consort), the date in their case was probably three years later. Summers proposed a sitting posture for each figure, based on the authority of many Roman marble portraits.¹¹The two seated consular figures of the Pio-Clementino Museum at the Vatican, acquired from the dealer Thomas Jenkins by Pius VI in 1787, were particularly admired and imitated throughout the nineteenth century. He would also have been well aware that Queen Victoria had preferred a sitting posture for John Foley’s gilded statue of her late husband, installed within George Gilbert Scott’s Albert Memorial in 1875.

In reporting the handover ceremony, the Argus quoted Clarke’s address to the trustees:

Gentlemen – it is my privilege to present to the National Gallery the statues in this chamber of Her Majesty the Queen, His Royal Highness the late Prince Consort, and their Royal Highnesses the Prince and Princess of Wales. I would be wanting in feeling if I did not refer to the talented artist who created these figures, and who unfortunately died while he was on his way to place them with his own hand within this gallery (cheers).

In reply, Sir Redmond Barry, Chairman of the Council of Trustees, continued:

The trustees gratefully accept the truly noble donation which you have bestowed on this institution, and undertake to preserve it for the benefit of the community to which you have been so bounteous … It is gratifying to the trustees in many respects that such a conspicuous instance of the liberality of your nature should have assumed this form. Fortunate as you are in being the inheritor of estates and means in extent and amount, far beyond what is usually allotted to an individual, you have shown that it is possible to make a right use of wealth.¹²Argus, 10 January 1879, p.6.

Soon after, the Victorian Government allocated £2000 for the construction of an octagonal hall to receive these and other marbles.¹³Charles Rudd’s 1886–87 photograph of the Marble Hall, including the statues of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, is in the State Library of Victoria; it is reproduced in McCulloch’s Encyclopedia of Australian Art, Aus Art/Miegunyah, Melbourne, 2006, accompanying the entry on Charles Summers. As the collection of the NGV grew, additional galleries were built and, in due course, this space was reorganised, with the ideal sculptures moved to other larger galleries as they were constructed. The statues of the royal family remained in the Entrance Hall of the combined institution at least until the First World War.¹⁴A photograph of the statues of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in situ is reproduced in the Illustrated Catalogue of the National Gallery, 1911.

These are the statues described in the NGV’s 1941 Annual Report as stored in the vaults and unworthy of exhibition, which the trustees and director deaccessioned, with no memory of Redmond Barry’s promise to ‘preserve [the truly noble donation] for the benefit of the community’. All four were conceived by the artist as being displayed exclusively indoors, and were therefore carved from softer marble. With no concern or understanding of this, they were consigned to be placed out of doors and, for over more than half a century, have been degraded by weather and vandalism. The statues of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were gifted to the Royal Agricultural Society and placed in the Melbourne Showgrounds, where they remain today; the statue of Edward, Prince of Wales, was gifted to the King Edward Sailors’ Rest in Geelong and placed out-of-doors in front of the building;¹⁵Geelong’s Mission to Seamen, on the seafront. It has been moved several times due to road construction projects, and is currently in a council depot, the head having been knocked off and stolen by vandals. I am grateful to Peter Alsop and Steve Yewdall for information about the statue. and that of the Princess of Wales (Queen Alexandra), was gifted to the Shire of Alexandra in country Victoria. While it, too, has suffered from exposure to the elements, it is the only one now protected by a canopy to prevent further degradation.

When William Clarke’s gift of the Summers statues was made in 1878, there were already a number of other portraits of the queen in public and governmental buildings in Melbourne. In 1859 a full-size copy of Franz Xaver Winterhalter’s famous 1843 portrait of Queen Victoria, in which she wears the larger Diamond Diadem,¹⁶In the Throne Room at Windsor Castle, with its pair, Winterhalter’s portrait of Prince Albert. The Diamond Diadem worn by Queen Victoria was made for George IV by Rundell in 1820, to be worn at the 1821 coronation: it consisted of 1333 diamonds. Eugene Barilo von Reisberg lists a large number of copies; gifts from the queen herself to European royalty, and others for government buildings in Britain and embassies abroad and in the colonies (see ‘Garters and petticoats: Franz Xaver Winterhalter’s 1843 portraits of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’, Melbourne Art Journal, issue 5, 2010). The name of the copyist of the Melbourne picture is unrecorded, although it may be inscribed on the stretcher. A despatch from London of 14 October 1859 from the Duke of Newcastle informed the governor that the picture had been consigned (Archives, Parliament House Library, Melbourne). The picture is today hung on a balcony overlooking the Queen’s Hall and is difficult to see. was sent by the British Government for display in the new Parliament House in Melbourne, then under construction and only partially completed. The portrait arrived in Melbourne in early 1860 (figs 3 & 4). Only the portrait of the queen was sent, but much later, in 1895–96, a copy of its pair, that of Prince Albert, was commissioned by a generous citizen, Mrs Silas Harding, from the talented up-and-coming painter Gordon Coutts;¹⁷Table Talk, 1 February 1895, reported that ‘Mrs Silas Harding, who has purchased “Bracknell”, the former residence of Sir Matthew Davies, has commissioned Mr Gordon Coutts, who has rapidly come to the front as a portrait painter, to paint a portrait of the late Prince Consort, for presentation to the Legislative Council of Victoria’. The picture, which hangs above the Queen’s Hall beside that of Queen Victoria, is signed on the lower right: ‘After Winterhalter by Gordon Coutts’. his copy of the Winterhalter, while respectable, bears all the hallmarks of having been painted without the benefit of working from the original.

At some time in the mid 1850s, good quality copies of Winterhalter’s 1842 three-quarter-length portraits of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had arrived at Government House (figs 6 & 7). It is interesting to note that the queen seems to have preferred Winterhalter’s second version of her portrait, more elegant and more formal (with the queen wearing, for example, the Order of the Garter), which she had commissioned for presentation to King Louis-Philippe of France. The picture was installed in Louis-Philippe’s Musée du Roi at Versailles, where it remains today. The portrait of Prince Albert, wearing a field marshal’s undress uniform, however, replicated the first version, still at Windsor with its pair, the first version of the queen’s portrait.

The preference for copies of Winterhalter’s portraits is hardly surprising, as it was well-known that the queen had the highest regard for his work. By the middle of 1842, when he came to England, the queen already owned six pictures, and Victoria personally selected high-quality copies of two of her favourite family portraits by the artist for exhibition in Melbourne.¹⁸The Royal Collection today contains more than one hundred works by Winterhalter. Winterhalter arrived in London in June 1842 with the highest recommendations from the queen of the Belgians; he was accommodated at Windsor Castle, and immediately began work on the portraits of 1842 and 1843, copies of which in due course came to Melbourne.

It has perhaps been forgotten that when the four statues by Summers arrived at the NGV in 1878, there was already another monumental marble statue of the queen prominently displayed in the Public Library/ NGV building: Marshall Wood’s full-length figure which today dominates the Queen’s Hall at Parliament House (fig. 5). Queen Victoria is depicted wearing overtly classical dress (reflecting, for example, Gibson’s classicising Queen Victoria statue of 1844–47);¹⁹Royal Collection; see Marsden, pp. 72–3. she wears the Regal Circlet,²⁰After Albert’s death in December 1861, Queen Victoria never again wore the Regal Circlet. Information kindly provided by Jane Roberts. and holds a sceptre and the laurel wreath of victory (Victoria). The statue is dated 1876 and is recorded as being on public view in 1877. It should be noted that Wood’s public presentation of the statue in Melbourne was speculative. The Argus reported in August 1877 that it was under consideration and ‘will probably be secured by the Government, to be erected in the centre of the new hall now in course of construction in connexion with the Parliament-house’; by November the Sydney Morning Herald reported that it had been purchased by the Victorian Government for 3000 guineas.²¹Sydney Morning Herald, 2 November 1877, p. 5.

Marshall Wood was an emerging British sculptor of considerable merit, an admired pupil of Gibson, who had achieved a great success at London’s International Exhibition of 1862, primarily with his statue of Daphne, acquired by Lady Waldegrave. Given its success, a number of replicas were commissioned, including one for the Marquess of Landsdowne, and the NGV acquired its own version of Daphne in 1877, for the high price of 1000 guineas. Wood appears to have developed something of a speciality in full-length marble portraits of Queen Victoria and, in December 1877, was forced to defend the work acquired for Melbourne against suggestions that he had merely replicated earlier versions. He wrote to the Argus from the Melbourne Club on 13 December:

Finding … that it has been given out … that the statue of the Queen, at present in the National Gallery is a replica of an original in another place, will you permit me through your columns to state that, so far from this being the case, it is an original work in itself, and distinct from the statues executed by myself, either in the Senate Chamber at Ottawa; the one executed for the Parliament Houses at Toronto, exhibited by command of Her Majesty in the Royal Academy of 1875; the one in Montreal, unveiled by the Governor-General of Canada in 1868; or the one now being erected in Calcutta (fig. 9).²²Argus, 14 December 1877, p. 7.

It is not entirely clear how much time Wood spent in Australia in the period 1877–1882, during which he is regularly reported as being in both Melbourne and Sydney. When the Argus reported Wood’s death in England in July 1882, it noted that he had only left Melbourne a few months earlier, and that his statue of Queen Victoria was now installed at Parliament House. In honour of the queen’s Golden Jubilee in 1887, the Great Hall of Parliament House was renamed Queen’s Hall and, to celebrate the event, a magnificent new plinth of porphyry-like granite was commissioned; available documents suggest that the final form of the statue and plinth, as we know it today, was achieved around 1890.²³A fine drawing of the plinth, produced by the Public Works Department, noting the different coloured granites employed, survives in the PROV, dated 1890. I am grateful to Charlie Farrugia of PROV for drawing this to my attention.

The inhabitants of nineteenth-century Melbourne had other opportunities to see major royal portraits on temporary loan. The new Catalogue of the Paintings in the Public Library, Museum and National Gallery, published in 1875 to coincide with the opening of the first of the large purpose-built picture galleries, contained a preface on the growth of the collection, also noting the success of the NGV’s 1869 Loan Exhibition, and reflecting on the example of similar exhibitions in England, to which the queen had made generous loans. Melburnians were therefore delighted when Queen Victoria proposed to lend a group of modern works from the Royal Collection, all illustrative of personal, family events, to the Melbourne International Exhibition of 1880. The queen contributed the following major works, most of which reflected the growing fashion for large-scale commemorative pictures of events, containing large numbers of individual portraits:²⁴A trend reflected in Australian art through Carl Kahler’s Melbourne Cup pictures of c.1887–89 (the property of the VRC at Flemington), and Tom Roberts’s commission to paint the Opening of the First Federal Parliament, 1901–03, today displayed in the High Court building in Canberra.

‘The Queen Receiving the Sacrament (the concluding part of the ceremony of Her Majesty’s Coronation) on the 28th of June 1838’, By C. R. Leslie, R.A.

‘The Royal Family in 1857’. Copied by Signor Belli from F. Winterhalter’s Picture at Osborne.²⁵The date 1857 is clearly a printing error. The picture was painted in 1846, and hung at Osborne; Belli’s copy, which remained in the royal family, was able, therefore, to be hung in another of the royal residences. While Queen Victoria and Prince Albert liked it enormously, many British critics savaged it; in 1847 the critic for The Athenaeum, in a moment of xenophobia, denounced its want of taste, ‘as makes us frankly rejoice that it is not from the hand of an Englishman’ (see Marsden, p. 496).

‘The Marriage of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle’, 10 March 1863. By W.P. Frith, R.A (fig. 10).

‘The Royal Procession to St. Paul’s Cathedral on the Thanksgiving Day,
27 February 1872.’ By N. Chevalier.

The 1880 Melbourne edition of the Catalogue of Pictures, Drawings, and Art Objects lent to The Royal Commission for the Australian International Exhibition published extensive notes, allowing viewers to identify all the key participants in the royal events portrayed. The Prince of Wales, appointed by the queen as president of the commission, loaned from his own collection Nicholas Chevalier’s Ceremony of the opening of the International Exhibition in Vienna, 1873, which contained more than one hundred individual portraits. A private collector loaned Henry Nelson O’Neill’s The landing of Princess Alexandra at Gravesend, March 7th, 1863 (now NPG, London), extending considerably the representations of the Prince and Princess of Wales available in Melbourne in 1880, including Summers’s marble seated portraits at the NGV. It is clear from many published sources that the Princess of Wales was held in particularly high esteem in Australia. In the previous year, 1879, Thomas Chirnside of Werribee Park had acquired from Marshall Wood marble busts of the Prince and Princess of Wales, which were prominently displayed in the entrance hall of his new Italianate mansion near Melbourne, completed in 1877.²⁶Surviving documents make it clear that the busts were shipped to Melbourne from London, arriving in October 1879. Thomas Chirnside had in fact met the Waleses at a shooting party at Dunrobin Castle in 1868, where they were staying with the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland. The busts, which cost the considerable sum of £430, remained in the house after the sale, c.1922, of the contents, when Werribee Park was acquired by the Catholic Church. The church gifted the busts to the Commonwealth Government in 1927 (coinciding with the transfer of Federal Parliament to Canberra), and the Commonwealth Government subsequently returned them, placing them on loan to Werribee Park, when it became a public house/museum, where they remain today. I am grateful to Terry Lane and Greg Leigh for information about the busts.

At the 1888 Centennial International Exhibition, the Trustees of the Public Library and National Gallery lent the four marble figures by Summers, to become the focal point of the British Court. Each was strategically placed at equal intervals down the main concourse of the Exhibition Building, and each was distinguished by a highly visible canopy. Queen Victoria lent only two works to the 1888 Centennial Exhibition: Clarkson Stanfield’s Opening of London Bridge, 1st August 1831, and F. R. Say’s copy of Winterhalter’s famous painting The 1st of May, representing the queen, the prince consort, the infant Prince Arthur, and the 82-year-old Duke of Wellington.

It is perhaps surprising that no special event took place at the NGV, or commission undertaken, to celebrate the 1887 jubilee, but early in 1889 the trustees asked Sir Henry Loch, the governor of Victoria, if he could consult the queen on their wish to commission a portrait of her by Herkomer, ‘or any other artist she might select’. Queen Victoria disliked sitting for portraits, and declined, so Loch counter-proposed with a suggestion that a copy of her ‘Jubilee portrait’ might be made.²⁷It has been suggested that this might refer to Prof. Von Angeli’s famous portrait of 1885, but it seems just as likely that Sir Henry Loch was referring to the queen’s official jubilee photographic portrait. Herkomer, not surprisingly, rejected this, but proposed instead that he might base his picture on Alfred Gilbert’s bronze Golden Jubilee statue, in the Great Hall of Winchester Castle, which had aroused considerable interest and comment, though not all favourable.²⁸On the Winchester statue, see Richard Dorment, Alfred Gilbert, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1985, pp. 72–9. In order to assist, the queen’s fourth daughter, Princess Louise, Marchioness of Lorne (known for her interest in the promotion of visual arts in Australia, as an honorary member (with the Princess of Wales) of the Royal Anglo-Australian Society of Artists), arranged for Herkomer to take tea with the queen ‘so that he might gather some direct and more personal impressions’ for the execution of the NGV’s picture.²⁹See J. Saxon Mills, Life and Letters of Sir Hubert Herkomer, CVO, RA: A Study in Struggle and Success, Hutchinson, London, 1923, p. 204. The portrait (minus the rather intrusive overhanging canopy, a key feature of Gilbert’s statue) was completed on 2 December 1891, with Queen Victoria insisting on inspecting it the very next day.³⁰See ‘Agent-general of Victoria accounts’, 2 December 1891, PROV 5873/1. Herkomer, a favourite of the queen,³¹Queen Victoria created him OM (Order of Merit) in 1899, a high personal distinction in the gift of the monarch, and he was knighted by Edward VII in 1907; in 1899, Victoria’s grandson Emperor Wilhelm of Germany, ennobled him, as a result of which he added ‘von’ to his name. represented her wearing the Order of the Garter, and holding the orb designed by Gilbert, with a figure of Victory hovering above (fig. 8).

As a result of his contact with both the agent-general for Victoria and the governor, Herkomer proposed to the trustees that he might be engaged by Melbourne to assist with the selection of works for acquisition, and the trustees readily agreed. Perhaps Herkomer assumed a special affinity with Melbourne, as his family had briefly emigrated in 1851 in search of gold, returning to England and settling in Southampton in 1857. He recommended, inter alia, Dicksee’s The crisis, and Waterhouse’s Ulysses and the Sirens ³²See also Leonard Cox, The National Gallery of Victoria 1861–1968: A Search for a Collection, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1971, pp. 47, 52. The portrait of Queen Victoria was shipped to Melbourne in early 1892,³³ ‘Trustee minutes’, 4 February 1892, noting correspondence from the acting agent-general on the shipment, NGV archives. but for reasons still not clear, the new NGV director, Bernard Hall, did not hang it until September 1893.³⁴ibid., 28 September 1893, letter from the director. Herkomer’s involvement as an adviser was short-lived, however; as a result of the devastating financial crisis of the 1890s, which effectively obliterated Marvellous Melbourne’s financial and building boom, the Government of Victoria instituted drastic financial cuts, and in 1893 Herkomer’s instructions to advise and spend on behalf of the NGV were abruptly revoked.

The aim of the second exhibition of the Royal Anglo-Australian Society of Artists, held in 1892, was to bring major works by British artists to Australia – in effect, an echo of the annual Royal Academy Exhibition in London – to maintain the momentum (and consequent sales opportunities) created by the fine art sections of the international exhibitions of 1880 and 1888. It was well-organised with vice-regal patrons and a distinguished list of honorary members headed by the Princess of Wales and Princess Louise, and including Sir Frederick Leighton and Sir John Everett Millais; there was a council made up of well-known Royal Academicians, and a group of foreign honorary members. A guarantee fund had been set up by a number of Melbourne businessmen, including Alfred Felton who was soon to buy Rupert Bunny’s A sea idyll (cat. no. 90) priced at £105, which he presented to the NGV.³⁵See Exhibition of the British Art Gallery by the Royal Anglo-Australian Society of Artists, with which is Associated the German Art Gallery and a Selection of Pictures by Australian Artists, Illustrated Catalogue, Compiled and Edited for the Society by J. Lake, Manager in Australia, Melbourne, 1892. Of special interest for the general public was a section of the exhibition dedicated to original works by Queen Victoria: four drawings, one watercolour and twelve etchings, of which seven were by the queen and five by Prince Albert.

The catalogue offered readers in Melbourne an enthusiastic account of the queen’s involvement: ‘The request was very graciously granted, Her Majesty taking a strong personal interest in the work and objects of the Society, and in the welfare of Art throughout the Empire’.³⁶ibid., pp. 75–6. At the conclusion of the exhibition, Queen Victoria decided to present the twelve etchings to the NGV. Their accession into the collection was formally noted at the meeting of the Council of Trustees on May 1893. Later that year Bernard Hall installed the etchings, principally consisting of portraits of Victoria and Albert’s children (fig. 11), in the vestibule leading to the Stawell Gallery, adjacent to Herkomer’s recently arrived large oil painting of the queen. For many years they were on permanent display, admired and enjoyed by the general public.

The next major royal anniversary was Queen Victoria’s 1897 Diamond Jubilee, celebrating sixty years on the throne. Unlike the Golden Jubilee of 1887, which had tended to celebrate the queen (and her accomplishments) as an individual and as the matriarch of a vast, extended pan-European royal family,³⁷On the Golden Jubilee of 1887, see esp. This Brilliant Year: Queen Victoria’s Jubilee, 1887, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 19 March – 10 July 1977. it was firmly the view of the British Government, and of the queen, that the 1897 jubilee celebrations should be centred on the idea of the nation and the Empire.³⁸See esp. Greg King, Twilight of Splendour: The Court of Queen Victoria During the Diamond Jubilee Year, John Wiley, Hoboken, NJ, 2007, pp. 19–23. The Australian colonies, well-advanced in the debate on Federation, were determined to take full advantage of the British Government’s wish for the dominions to play a central role. For the next few months the Melbourne press was full of reports of events in London. All the colonial premiers and their wives, and other senior government ministers and officials, travelled to London, and the coaches carrying the colonial premiers led the jubilee procession. Their subsequent private meeting with the queen, and the review of the colonial troops at Windsor, were reported in detail.

In addition to the many public celebrations in Melbourne, culminating in a jubilee carriage procession through the city on 22 June, the NGV mounted an extensive Diamond Jubilee Loan Exhibition, with leading citizens (including some artists) lending key works from their collections. For the first time an NGV loan exhibition concentrated more on contemporary Australian works than British and European; the exhibition included pictures such as Tom Roberts’s Shearing the rams (lent by Edward Trenchard), and Fred McCubbin’s A bush burial (lent by J. Falkingham).

Queen Victoria lent one major work from the Royal Collection, J. Phillip’s Marriage of the Princess Royal (fig. 12) and the Parliament of Victoria lent the two copies of Winterhalter’s 1843 portraits. In common with the rest of the Empire, Melbourne was awash with Diamond Jubilee memorabilia, with the Fisher Brother’s elaborately etched giltwood oval mirror, with its portrait of the queen,³⁹NGV, acquired 1997. The mirror descended through the Fisher family, but there is an oral tradition within the family that the mirror had been hung at Parliament House and later returned to the family – presumably when Victoriana became unfashionable. The Fisher Brothers first appear in trade directories in Melbourne in the late 1890s, and it can be presumed that this was a particularly glamorous production made specifically for the Jubilee. a particularly elaborate example (fig. 13).

In Melbourne there was no public sculptural commission to celebrate the jubilee, but the City of Ballarat commissioned the young Australian sculptor Bertram Mackennal to carve a marble statue, which was unveiled on 24 May 1900 (fig. 16).⁴⁰See esp. Deborah Edwards et al., Bertram Mackennal, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2007, pp. 54–6.  Indisputably the best of the many statues which soon proliferated in Australia following the queen’s death in January 1901, this work looked to Alfred Gilbert above all, reproducing the orb with a figure of Victory (Victoria) hovering above, invented by Gilbert for the 1887 Golden Jubilee statue in Winchester. Four bronze reliefs were set into the base – including representations of Lord Conyngham advising Princess Victoria of her accession to the throne, 1837; The Coronation, 1838; The Diamond Jubilee of 1897; and Queen Victoria signing the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia, 9 July 1900; in which the queen, in her study at Windsor Castle, sits before a Rococo table, presided over by a bust of Prince Albert, signing the Constitution Act (fig. 17).⁴¹A French bureau-plat of the 1740s. See Hugh Roberts, “Collecting French Furniture before George IV”, Apollo vol. CLVI, no. 486, August 2002, p. 8. The table remained in Australia and is on public view at Parliament House, Canberra.

It is interesting to note the symbolic gesture of bringing to Australia the actual table on which the queen signed the Act for use in the first official ceremony of the new Commonwealth; the first Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia took his oath of office at the same table, at a ceremony at Sydney’s Centennial Park on 1 January 1901.

The Ballarat statue was the first of Mackennal’s many commissions for royal portraits, with the Melbourne-born sculptor arguably becoming the most successful and prolific British sculptor of royal portraits in the early decades of the twentieth century.⁴²Mackennal received two other commissions for monumental statues of Queen Victoria, one for Lahore in India (now Pakistan) in 1897, for the jubilee, and one in Blackburn, Lancashire, a memorial statue completed in 1903.

The death of Queen Victoria at Osborne on 22 January 1901 ushered in both a period of mourning throughout Britain and the Empire, and a rush to create suitable memorial statues celebrating Britain’s longest reigning monarch.⁴³For photographs of the major Queen Victoria memorial statues in the state of Victoria, see pp. 42-3 in this issue. Melbourne was no exception. It was pointed out in the press on more than one occasion that Melbourne, given its size and wealth, was unusual in not already having a public statue of Queen Victoria. A committee to raise the estimated £10,000 was rapidly established, although the Argus had to report on 20 February 1901, a month after the queen’s death, that so far only £3000 had been raised by public subscription. It was decided to launch a public competition, with advertisements to appear in the British and Australian press, and it was even hoped that Victoria’s grandson, the Duke of York, could lay the foundation stone while in Melbourne in May 1901 for the opening of the first Federal Parliament.

That was not to be, as it took some time for the civic authorities to decide where the statue might be placed. Melbourne’s grid system did not provide any suitable public parks in the heart of the city. Charles Summers’s son, Charles F. Summers, wrote to the press proposing the creation of a large Victoria Park in Spring Street,⁴⁴Argus, 13 February 1901, p. 5. to the north of Parliament House, but eventually a site in St Kilda Road, just south of the river was chosen. The competition was launched in mid 1902 and in 1903 the Sydney-based sculptor James White was selected to execute the monument (figs 18 & 19).

The marble statue of the queen was 4.5 metres high, raised up on a substantial architectural plinth, with niches containing large allegorical figures, also carved in white marble, of Progress, Wisdom, History and Justice, each armed with appropriate attributes. The total height of the statue and base was over thirteen metres, making it the largest and most ambitious Victoria memorial in Australia.

The form of the base, constructed of New South Wales marble and Harcourt granite, was loosely modelled on the third-century Temple of Venus at Baalbek in what is today Syria, which, after its first publication by Robert Wood in 1757 (The Ruins of Baalbec), inspired innumerable garden monuments throughout Britain and Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Work progress-ed through 1905, with Melbourne’s Queen Victoria monument finally completed in 1906, at a total cost of £6200. The memorial reflects a firmly established type, with a heavily robed queen standing frontally, wearing the Order of the Garter, armed with sceptre and orb, or other variants, and wearing the Small Imperial Crown, with veil.

James White also received the commission to carve Bendigo’s Victoria memorial (fig. 15), on a smaller scale, with the white marble statue raised on a granite pedestal, with handsome Art Nouveau bronze mounts, and a central inscription: ‘Victoria. Queen of Earthly Queens. Erected by the Citizens of Bendigo’, with a further inscription around the circular base: ‘An Empire upon which the sun never sets’.⁴⁵White won the competition and commenced work in 1902; the unveiling took place in early 1903. It is notable that, on this occasion, Victoria holds in her left hand not an orb but, rather, the dove of peace. The last of Victoria’s major Victoria memorials was erected in Geelong (fig. 14). As the result of a public competition, the design of a local resident, Clement Nash, was selected, but it was the Melbourne sculptor John Swan Davie who modelled the statue in clay and whose name appears on the base; the bronze cast was made by Palantini of London, and sent to Geelong for erection, being unveiled on 24 May 1904, the late queen’s birthday. In form, the Geelong statue reflects the general type, with the inscription ‘Victoria Queen and Empress 1837–1901. An Empire on which the sun never sets’ on the plinth. Originally placed in Geelong’s Market Square, it was moved in 1912 to its present site at the entrance to Eastern Park.

When, in early 1868, six hundred Old Victorian Colonists (including John Pascoe Fawkner and Edward Henty) presented an address to Queen Victoria’s son, the Duke of Edinburgh, they anticipated one of the great debates of our own time:

We can confidently assure your Royal Highness that, however attractive republican institutions may be to young communities generally, Victoria is in the main free from any such predilection … [our] material interests will be best protected by the perpetuation of an intimate connection with the great Empire over which Her Majesty rules – an empire the language, laws, customs, and institutions of which it is their privilege to inherit.⁴⁶Argus, 4 January 1868, p. 5.

It is, therefore, worthwhile to recall and record the iconography of royal portrait-ure in colonial Victoria to remind us of the ideas, aspirations and motivations of the first generations of Anglo-colonial settlers.

Dr Gerard Vaughan, Director, National Gallery of Victoria (in 2011).

Notes
Many people have assisted with the preparation of this article. First, I would like to acknowledge the contribution made by my assistant Marissa Cassin, who has undertaken extensive research, supported by Christine Barraclough. At the NGV I am particularly grateful to Laurie Benson (International Art), Garry Sommerfeld and Christian Markel (Photographic Services), and Cathy Leahy (Prints and Drawings). Jane and Hugh Roberts of the Royal Collection have generously provided key information, and I would also like to thank Alison Inglis, Eugene von Reisburg, Terry Lane, Charlie Farrugia and Julie Gardner for much helpful advice and information.

1      Designated at the time the Melbourne Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Victoria Act, 1869, gave the institution its new name.

2      Queen Victoria died just three weeks after the new nation of Australia became a political reality (1 January 1901), having signed the Constitution of Australia Act on 9 July 1900.

3      It was conceived as a memento of the queen’s visit to Manchester in 1851; the donor hoped that it would in due course inspire a full-size statue of the queen, and it is recorded that in 1857 Prince Albert unveiled a statue of the queen by Noble in Salford, near Manchester (see Jonathon Marsden (ed.), Victoria & Albert: Art & Love, Royal Collection Publications, London, 2010, p. 129).

4      See Catalogue of the Statues and Busts in Marble and Casts in the National Gallery of Victoria, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1880, p. 3. Deaccessioned under Daryl Lindsay in 1943, the bust was disposed of at the Leonard Joel auction (held on the NGV premises) of 18 May 1943; purchased by ‘Spencer’ (see Ken Scarlett, Australian Sculptors, Thomas Nelson, Melbourne, 1980, p. 624). Summers’s marble bust of the Duke of Edinburgh was sent by the artist from Rome to the Royal Academy in 1873. There is no documentary evidence to establish whether Abraham Linacre purchased the bust exhibited at the RA, or instead commissioned a replica from Summers’s studio in Rome. Given the date of the gift to Melbourne of 1873, the former is more likely.

5      However, the minutes of the executive committee for the National Gallery of Victoria of 27 February 1941 recorded that an order-in-council be requested to ‘sell or dispose of certain pictures and sculptures’. Daryl Lindsay was formally appointed director on 26 March 1941, but it can be assumed that in the preceding months (given his predecessor’s illness and total alienation from the board) he was already advising council president Keith Murdoch on policy. The Annual Report, 1941, p. 3, noted the transforming effect of acquisitions through the Felton Bequest: ‘As a consequence there have accumulated in the vaults a number of pictures and statuary whose standard does not qualify them for exhibition, and which are unsuitable even for loan purposes. A tentative list was submitted by the Director of such exhibits’. Daryl Lindsay’s abhorrence of Victorian art and taste is well documented, but in proposing the deaccession of Victoriana he also reflected similar processes in Europe and North America.

6      On Summers see esp. Margaret Thomas, A Hero of the Workshop and a Somersetshire Worthy, Charles Summers, Sculptor, Hamilton, London, 1879; and the outstanding entry in Scarlett, Australian Sculptors,  pp. 621–31.

7      See the obituary of Charles Summers’s brother Eli, published in the Tarnagulla and Llanelly Courier (a typescript of an undated obituary, given to Ken Scarlett, who deposited a copy in the NGV Library), which makes it clear the information had come from Eli Summers’s daughter and her husband, Rev. J. B. Sharp.

8      Following Summers’s sudden death in Paris in November 1878, en route to London and then Melbourne for the installation of the statues at the NGV, London’s Art Journal published a short notice; the only works specifically identified were the royal portraits (see Art Journal, February 1879, p. 12).

9      See Thomas, section 2, p. 14, which reproduces the transcript of the speeches on the occasion of the formal presentation by William J. Clarke, as published by the Argus, November 1878.

10      As the Prince and Princess of Wales did not marry until 1863 (the first major royal event permitted by the queen after the death of the Prince Consort), the date in their case was probably three years later.

11      The two seated consular figures of the Pio-Clementino Museum at the Vatican, acquired from the dealer Thomas Jenkins by Pius VI in 1787, were particularly admired and imitated throughout the nineteenth century.

12      Argus, 10 January 1879, p.6.

13      Charles Rudd’s 1886–87 photograph of the Marble Hall, including the statues of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, is in the State Library of Victoria; it is reproduced in McCulloch’s Encyclopedia of Australian Art, Aus Art/Miegunyah, Melbourne, 2006, accompanying the entry on Charles Summers.

14      A photograph of the statues of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in situ is reproduced in the Illustrated Catalogue of the National Gallery, 1911.

15      Geelong’s Mission to Seamen, on the seafront. It has been moved several times due to road construction projects, and is currently in a council depot, the head having been knocked off and stolen by vandals. I am grateful to Peter Alsop and Steve Yewdall for information about the statue.

16      In the Throne Room at Windsor Castle, with its pair, Winterhalter’s portrait of Prince Albert. The Diamond Diadem worn by Queen Victoria was made for George IV by Rundell in 1820, to be worn at the 1821 coronation: it consisted of 1333 diamonds. Eugene Barilo von Reisberg lists a large number of copies; gifts from the queen herself to European royalty, and others for government buildings in Britain and embassies abroad and in the colonies (see ‘Garters and petticoats: Franz Xaver Winterhalter’s 1843 portraits of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’, Melbourne Art Journal, issue 5, 2010). The name of the copyist of the Melbourne picture is unrecorded, although it may be inscribed on the stretcher. A despatch from London of 14 October 1859 from the Duke of Newcastle informed the governor that the picture had been consigned (Archives, Parliament House Library, Melbourne). The picture is today hung on a balcony overlooking the Queen’s Hall and is difficult to see.

17                    Table Talk, 1 February 1895, reported that ‘Mrs Silas Harding, who has purchased “Bracknell”, the former residence of Sir Matthew Davies, has commissioned Mr Gordon Coutts, who has rapidly come to the front as a portrait painter, to paint a portrait of the late Prince Consort, for presentation to the Legislative Council of Victoria’. The picture, which hangs above the Queen’s Hall beside that of Queen Victoria, is signed on the lower right: ‘After Winterhalter by Gordon Coutts’.

18      The Royal Collection today contains more than one hundred works by Winterhalter.

19      Royal Collection; see Marsden, pp. 72–3.

20      After Albert’s death in December 1861, Queen Victoria never again wore the Regal Circlet. Information kindly provided by Jane Roberts.

21      Sydney Morning Herald, 2 November 1877, p. 5.

22      Argus, 14 December 1877, p. 7.

23      A fine drawing of the plinth, produced by the Public Works Department, noting the different coloured granites employed, survives in the PROV, dated 1890. I am grateful to Charlie Farrugia of PROV for drawing this to my attention.

24      A trend reflected in Australian art through Carl Kahler’s Melbourne Cup pictures of c.1887–89 (the property of the VRC at Flemington), and Tom Roberts’s commission to paint the Opening of the First Federal Parliament, 1901–03, today displayed in the High Court building in Canberra.

25      The date 1857 is clearly a printing error. The picture was painted in 1846, and hung at Osborne; Belli’s copy, which remained in the royal family, was able, therefore, to be hung in another of the royal residences. While Queen Victoria and Prince Albert liked it enormously, many British critics savaged it; in 1847 the critic for The Athenaeum, in a moment of xenophobia, denounced its want of taste, ‘as makes us frankly rejoice that it is not from the hand of an Englishman’ (see Marsden, p. 496).

26      Surviving documents make it clear that the busts were shipped to Melbourne from London, arriving in October 1879. Thomas Chirnside had in fact met the Waleses at a shooting party at Dunrobin Castle in 1868, where they were staying with the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland. The busts, which cost the considerable sum of £430, remained in the house after the sale, c.1922, of the contents, when Werribee Park was acquired by the Catholic Church. The church gifted the busts to the Commonwealth Government in 1927 (coinciding with the transfer of Federal Parliament to Canberra), and the Commonwealth Government subsequently returned them, placing them on loan to Werribee Park, when it became a public house/museum, where they remain today. I am grateful to Terry Lane and Greg Leigh for information about the busts.

27      It has been suggested that this might refer to Prof. Von Angeli’s famous portrait of 1885, but it seems just as likely that Sir Henry Loch was referring to the queen’s official jubilee photographic portrait.

28      On the Winchester statue, see Richard Dorment, Alfred Gilbert, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1985, pp. 72–9.

29      See J. Saxon Mills, Life and Letters of Sir Hubert Herkomer, CVO, RA: A Study in Struggle and Success, Hutchinson, London, 1923, p. 204.

30      See ‘Agent-general of Victoria accounts’, 2 December 1891, PROV 5873/1.

31      Queen Victoria created him OM (Order of Merit) in 1899, a high personal distinction in the gift of the monarch, and he was knighted by Edward VII in 1907; in 1899, Victoria’s grandson Emperor Wilhelm of Germany, ennobled him, as a result of which he added ‘von’ to his name.

32      See also Leonard Cox, The National Gallery of Victoria 1861–1968: A Search for a Collection, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1971, pp. 47, 52.

33      ‘Trustee minutes’, 4 February 1892, noting correspondence from the acting agent-general on the shipment, NGV archives.

34      ibid., 28 September 1893, letter from the director.

35      See Exhibition of the British Art Gallery by the Royal Anglo-Australian Society of Artists, with which is Associated the German Art Gallery and a Selection of Pictures by Australian Artists, Illustrated Catalogue, Compiled and Edited for the Society by J. Lake, Manager in Australia, Melbourne, 1892.

36      ibid., pp. 75–6.

37      On the Golden Jubilee of 1887, see esp. This Brilliant Year: Queen Victoria’s Jubilee, 1887, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 19 March – 10 July 1977.

38      See esp. Greg King, Twilight of Splendour: The Court of Queen Victoria During the Diamond Jubilee Year, John Wiley, Hoboken, NJ, 2007, pp. 19–23.

39      NGV, acquired 1997. The mirror descended through the Fisher family, but there is an oral tradition within the family that the mirror had been hung at Parliament House and later returned to the family – presumably when Victoriana became unfashionable. The Fisher Brothers first appear in trade directories in Melbourne in the late 1890s, and it can be presumed that this was a particularly glamorous production made specifically for the Jubilee.

40      See esp. Deborah Edwards et al., Bertram Mackennal, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2007, pp. 54–6.

41      A French bureau-plat of the 1740s. See Hugh Roberts, “Collecting French Furniture before George IV”, Apollo vol. CLVI, no. 486, August 2002, p. 8. The table remained in Australia and is on public view at Parliament House, Canberra.

42      Mackennal received two other commissions for monumental statues of Queen Victoria, one for Lahore in India (now Pakistan) in 1897, for the jubilee, and one in Blackburn, Lancashire, a memorial statue completed in 1903.

43      For photographs of the major Queen Victoria memorial statues in the state of Victoria, see pp. 42-3 in this issue.

44      Argus, 13 February 1901, p. 5.

45      White won the competition and commenced work in 1902; the        unveiling took place in early 1903.

46      Argus, 4 January 1868, p. 5.