Franz Xaver Winterhalter

Franz Xaver Winterhalter was the painter every royal court in Europe wanted in the middle of the 19th century. Born in 1805 in a village in the Black Forest, he rose to become the favourite portraitist of monarchs from Paris to London to Vienna, a man who could make a crowned head look both grand and likeable.

He painted Queen Victoria and Prince Albert many times, and Victoria adored him. In France he served the court of Napoleon III, and his group portrait of the Empress Eugénie surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting, all silk and flowers in a garden, became the picture of Second Empire glamour. His portrait of the Austrian Empress Elisabeth, the famous Sisi, with diamond stars in her hair, is still her defining image.

Serious critics looked down on him as a mere society flatterer, and he cared little. What he could do better than almost anyone was paint fabric, the sheen of satin and gauze and jewels, and the courts of Europe paid handsomely for it right up to his death in 1873.