Princess Beatrice

A carte-de-visite portrait of Queen Victoria’s fifth daughter and last child, Princess Beatrice, seen here in elegant riding habit mounted side-saddle on a pony.

As the youngest child of the family (she was known as ‘Baby’), Princess Beatrice was always more indulged than the rest of her royal siblings. ‘She is a most amusing little dot, all the more so for being generally a little naughty…’ wrote the Queen. Aged four at the death of her father, she grew up in an oppressive atmosphere of morbid grief. She is seen here around 1865, when she was 8 years old.

Photographed by Robert Bingham of 58, rue de la Rochefoucauld, Paris.

Of British origin, Robert J. Bingham (1825-1870) established himself as a photographer in Paris in the middle of the 1850s. His backplate rather inaccurately claims that he was ‘the inventor of the collodion process’. On his death in 1870, the studio was taken over by Ferrier et Lecadre.