Prince Edward and Princess Alexandra

A hand-coloured carte-de-visite portrait of Prince Edward, Prince of Wales, and Princess Alexandra of Denmark, one of series of portraits taken to mark the occasion of their engagement, which took place at Laeken in Belgium in September 1862.

Some commentators found the photographs distasteful, condemning such a public display of intimacy for wholesale consumption. One journalist even branded the photographs fakes and claimed they were composites mocked up by an unscrupulous photographer:

’Every new art, unfortunately is sure to bring out a vast amount of bad taste on the part of its ignorant patrons. […] The majority of bad photographs are reprehensible on the grounds of taste rather than morality. […] Ever street passenger must have noticed those portraits of royal personages with which the shop windows have recently abounded. Probably he has got about a round dozen of them in his album. […] He fancies that he has got the veritable images of royalty. He does not know that a vast number of these supposed portraits from life are “cooked up” by foreign artists, whose main object is to make everything look pretty and sentimental. The result is often false and bad. Here, for instance, we have lying before us a card which contains portraits of the Prince of Wales and Princess Alexandra, issued several weeks before they were married. His Royal Highness sits in a chair, the Princess stands over the back of the chair, with her two hands resting on his two shoulders. Pretty, is it not? Sentimental, sweet and lover-like? Very – only not quite probable, or in the best taste. That a young lady may have stood, in that attitude of tender watching, at the chair of her future husband, is likely enough – but she would never think of being photographed at so confiding a moment. The lover would certainly object to the artist “posing” his intended in any such way, and the lady herself would object to it with still greater vehemence.’ [Originally printed in the London Review, the article was reprinted in Photographic News on 10 April 1862.

Photographed by Ghémar Frères of Brussels.