Victoria: Woman and Crown


Disappointing exhibition at Kensington Palace looking at the life and reign of Queen Victoria.

I say disappointing as it’s trying to be all things to all people in quite a limited space. It includes a rather strange installation by Jane Wildgoose looking at her grief for Albert and poems by local South-Asian women and University College London students on the subject of Empire.  There was also quite a bias towards her relationship with India. It would have been better to just tell the story of her life or of her relationship with India without the distractions.

There were some wonderful objects in the show including numerous of her dresses from which you gradually saw her getting more and more rotund. It was magical to see the dress she wore to the opening of the Great Exhibition particularly as I’d just watched that episode of “Victoria”! It’s always lovely to see the Winterhalter portrait of herself she commissioned for Albert showing her with her hair loose. The exhibition doesn’t shy from the depth of her grief and I hadn’t realised before that Albert and her mother died in the same year so no wonder it was such a blow to her.

Closes on 20 January 2020

Review
Evening Standard

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