Victoria became Queen of England June 20th, 1837 and was crowned on June 28th, 1838.
A few months later the Parisian newspaper "Gazette de France" announced an important invention of Jacques-Mande Daguerre: the daguerreotype, the first form of photography.
The procedure used by Daguerre was very slow and his English rival, William Henry Fox Talbot, only later developed the ability to do portraits.
When in October 1839 Victoria became engaged to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, the couple was portrayed by two paintings in miniature.
The first photographic portrait of Albert, dated 1842, was the work of William Constable; but already in 1840 the queen and her husband had bought views of Paris, Rome and other European cities built by Antoine Claudet, who had learned the new technique by Daguerre and opened a studio in London.
Since then begins a close relationship in both directions between the queen and the photograph.
The interest of Victoria and Albert, both as individuals and as collectors, contributed greatly to the popularity of daguerreotypes and their many successors; the popularity of the monarch, however, was enlarged and union site by appropriate photographs.
At his death his private collection contained over 20 thousand photographs, and Victoria had become one of the most photographed people in the world.
Victoria took the throne at eighteen, little more than a child; photography came along with his kingdom.
Many years later, Victoria was an old matriarch and photography had grown up with her, gaining traction and independent authorities.
There is also a film about the Victoria’s funeral, dated 1901, lasting a few minutes; the first film of the Lumiere brothers was shot in 1894.
June 2016
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