anything near a beauty, first met Joseph Edgar Boehm, a Hungarian born in Vienna who had been living in London for six years, when she started classes at the National Art Training School. Fourteen years older than Princess Louise, married with a young family, the blue-eyed, curly-haired, tall, slim, and wiry-like 'a battered soldier,' sculptor-in-ordinary to the queen, had achieved fame in English court circles with his statue of Queen Victoria, unveiled at Windsor Castle in 1869.
Princess Louise was already involved with Boehm at this time, and their relationship was of such concern to the queen that she deliberately sought out an appropriate husband for her daughter. Eventually, the Marquess of Lome, son of the Duke of Argyll, was chosen, because Louise very much wanted to live in Britain, she said, and the fact that Lome was homosexual may have been an asset. Louise spent very little time with Lome before they were married on March 21, 1871, at Windsor. Evidence from Louise's writings suggests that the couple did engage in physical marital relations, although according to some sources the physical relationship ended soon after the honeymoon.
Two years after their marriage, Princess Louise and the Marquess of Lome moved into an apartment in Kensington Palace, which happened to be close to both Boehm's studio and his home. Princess Louise continued to practice sculpture, working in Boehm's studio. In 1878, shortly after her old teacher Mary Thornycroft moved to Melbury Road, Louise had a studio built on the grounds of Kensington Palace. Godwin was her architect, and he explained the task to his architectural students: 'I built the studio 17 feet high and put over it a kind of Mansard roof, with windows looking into the garden. The walls are of red brick, there are green slates on the roof to match the old house… and all the light is reflected so as to reduce the horizontal ceiling as much as possible. This studio seems perfectly satisfactory to the Princess, to Mr. Boehm, the sculptor (for it is a sculptor's studio) and also to myself.'
The princess's relationship with Boehm continued throughout the 1880s, and the circumstances of Boehm's death in his studio in the company of Princess Louise on December 12, 1890, provided the press with much speculation. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt's version from his diaries is generally believed:
It was during one of these visits [of the princess to Boehm's studio] that while he was making love to her Boehm broke a blood-vessel and died actually in the Princess's arms. There was nobody else in the studio or anywhere about… and the Princess had the courage to take the key of the studio out of the dead man's pocket, and covered with blood as she was and locking the door behind her, got a cab and drove to Laking's [the Queen's physician], whom she found at home and took back with her to the studio. Boehm was dead and they made up a story between them to the effect that it had been while lifting or trying to lift one of the Statues that the accident occurred.
The sculptor Alfred Gilbert, who occupied a studio in the same premises, became an accomplice to their concocted story by taking responsibility for finding the body. Princess Louise championed him for the rest of his life, provided him with accommodations at Kensington Palace in later years, and saw that his ashes were buried at St. Paul's Cathedral when he died.
[3] I'm always interested when I run across another mention of Queen Victoria's personal servant, John Brown. I mentioned him in the notes for
According to Queen Victoria's journal (parts of which were copied by her youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice, before the original was destroyed-not an unusual circumstance in Victorian times, when appearances counted more than the truth), John Brown in October 1850 was 'a good looking, tall lad of twenty-three with fair curly hair, so very good humoured and willing,-always ready to do whatever is asked, and always with a smile on his face.' An indiscreet comment, of course, immediately comes to mind.
John Brown was a gillie at Balmoral from 1849 and in charge of the ponies there from 1855. Three years later the queen appointed him her personal servant in Scotland, to wait upon her at all times. At the end of 1864 (Prince Albert had died in 1861) Brown went south to be on duty at Osborne, too, and in February 1865 he was appointed her personal servant wherever she was, not only in Scotland. She described him to her eldest daughter as 'so quiet, has such an excellent head and memory, and is besides so devoted, and attached and clever and so wonderfully able to interpret one's wishes.'
When Queen Victoria made him her personal servant outside Scotland in 1865, he was thirty-seven and she thirty-nine.
The queen and Prince Albert had a small hut at Balmoral, where they could escape from the formality of life. At her husband's death, this property went to the Prince of Wales. Now Victoria needed once more 'some little Spot' to go occasionally for a night or two of quiet and seclusion. In 1866 she began planning additions to a small lodge at Glasallt Shiel, and on October 1, 1868, she slept there for the first time. Sir Henry Ponsonby felt that she always returned 'much the better and livelier' for her visits to the shiel, although he wouldn't himself have chosen so lonely a spot. On March 29, 1883, John Brown died, leaving the house the queen was building for him at Baile-na-Coille incomplete. The Glasallt became, according to her journal, 'now most terrible for her to visit-it is like death, far more than the peaceful Kirkyard… The Queen can never live at the Glasallt again. The whole thing was planned and arranged by him. He meant everything there. That bright Chapter in her saddened life is closed forever!'
In 1865, Victoria had published a small number of copies of
[4] During the second half of the nineteenth century, the most desirable locations in London for artists' colonies were St. John's Wood, Hampstead, Chelsea, and Kensington; the most prestigious address was Holland Park, home to the celebrated artists George Frederic Watts and Frederic Leighton, and to lesser lights such as Marcus Stone, Colin Hunter, Hamo Thorny croft, and Luke Fildes. The royal family were patrons of these artists, as were some members of the aristocracy, but their main supporters were the newly rich middle classes. Large fortunes were being made in Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, and London, and these industrialists wanted the 'genuine article and fresh paint' rather than a spurious 'Old Master.' And they were willing to pay well for what they wanted.
During a period when the average annual income was about one hundred pounds, many artists were earning in excess of five thousand pounds (roughly half a million pounds today). In the year Leighton commissioned his house in Holland Park, his receipts from sales of paintings and investments exceeded twenty-one thousand pounds. Leighton was the model for Disraeli's Mr. Phoebus in
The houses commissioned by the artists in Holland Park now sell for several million pounds-a one-bedroom apartment carved out of Marcus Stone's large studio house sold in 1999 for over one million pounds.
The mid-quarter of the nineteenth century was the zenith of the artists and millionaire-princes in their palaces of art. The collapse in the value of Victorian art was well under way before the end of the century and the individual wealth and social status achieved by the artist in the Holland Park Circle was sustained only during their lifetimes. Only recently are Watts, Leighton, and Albert Moore regaining some of their former status.
[5] Regardless of the origins of golf, it was the Scots who gave the game its
