H.R.H. The Princess Alice 1861

Curator: This is "H.R.H. The Princess Alice," a photograph created around 1861 by John Jabez Edwin Mayall. What are your initial thoughts? Editor: It feels remarkably composed for the era, and oddly melancholic. She's presented in profile, but there's something in the tilt of her head, a reserved dignity tinged with sadness. The muted colors also contribute. Curator: Precisely. Mayall was a significant figure in the development of photography as a form of portraiture, and the socio-political context of royal imagery is quite loaded. How does it reflect, or perhaps challenge, Victorian ideals? This photograph of Princess Alice was widely disseminated, shaping her public persona. The photograph itself, as a readily available print, became a tool of visibility and royal propaganda. Editor: Absolutely. In viewing the photograph within a feminist framework, one could argue that it emphasizes Alice’s subordinate role, a princess awaiting her prescribed societal duty. We might read the stiff posture and controlled presentation as representative of patriarchal constraints placed upon royal women, a sort of "gilded cage." Curator: That reading holds up given our knowledge of her life: the limited agency she would have had in her own marriage, the pressures of representing the crown, her work as an advocate for women's education, the difficulties she had advocating for the less privileged during the social upheaval during the industrial revolution, the complexities surrounding being the mother to a child affected by hemophilia... Her gaze is not quite direct, as if turned away from something unavoidable. The print is rather beautiful when considering that burden. Editor: Agreed. Mayall manages to convey that sense of inner conflict or subdued resistance while ostensibly adhering to the conventions of royal portraiture. He allows something else to filter through. Ultimately, that quiet sense of interiority invites us to think more deeply about Alice’s multifaceted experiences as a woman navigating the restrictions imposed by her class and gender. Curator: An intriguing glimpse into a woman navigating her roles under historical and familial pressures and the photographer who bore witness.