Sewellisms # 16: The Prince and the Pudding
In his review of ‘Victoria and Albert: Art and Love’ at the Queens Gallery, Brian Sewell continues to criticise the appearance of British queens. Having described Lady Jane Grey as ‘plain Jane’ last week in his review of the Delaroche exhibition at the National Gallery, he now turns to Queen Victoria, taking up a position of sympathy with Prince Albert, who he speculates must have been a long suffering man to put up with a ‘pudding’ like Queen Vic.
She is described as…
‘a woman of utmost plainness […] with goitrous eyes to boot, retreating chin and teeth a trifle prominent’, [while Albert is a] ‘tall and handsome German princeling’.
Sewell finds it impossible to imagine that Albert could have loved Victoria as they grew older, asking…
‘could he, if ever he enjoyed their conjugations, still relish playing stallion to this plain pudding of a woman now that they were verging on their forties?’
…and can only conclude, in his typically misogynistic fashion, that she loved him, while he could not have:
‘Whatever the mature Albert thought of Victoria in a court crowded with notably prettier women, there can be no doubt that she demandingly adored him, perhaps to the point of close-focused nymphomania.’
Sewell seems astonished that there is no evidence to suggest that Albert was unfaithful, asking:
‘Was he so seduced by the deceitful improvements to Victoria’s features introduced by [artists] Winterhalter and his peers that he never saw her as she really was? Was he never tempted to taste tart instead of pudding?’
Obviously the hideous troll would be too much for any red blooded male to bear. And only one conclusion is possible. Albert submitted to a trifling bit of typhoid to get away from her:
‘Were the restraints imposed by her exhausting demands, physical, emotional and (it is whispered) sexual (there was no driving need for them to enrich most of the dynastic bloodlines of Europe with their Saxe-Coburg-Gotha genes), so dire that at 42, when typhoid took him to his grave, he had lost the will to live?’
Sewell cannot conceive of a successful relationship where the woman is more prominent, and so Albert’s life is characterised as a drudge:
‘Albert was trapped and caged by married life; Victoria was inescapable […] as the years wore on he became, in effect, her private and public secretary and a slave to affairs of state and family.’
But all of this is of course a prelude to what I suspect is the real thrust of Sewell’s argument:
‘That with his death her patronage of the arts fell away to nothing suggests that these were much more his interest than hers.’
All the Victorian era’s achievements in terms of patronage and stimulation of the arts are therefore due to the ‘educated’ husband, while the wife ‘commissioned their portraits by the dozen’ because she could not bear to be out of reach of him.
- Brian Sewell, ‘Beauty of the Beast in Victoria and Albert Exhibition’, The Evening Standard, 25 March 2010, < http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/review-23819077-beauty-of-the-beast-in-victoria-and-albert-exhibition.do>
