A Beautiful Love Story

The destiny of this Virgin and Child, a work by the famous Scottish painter William Dyce (1806–1864), is closely connected to a beautiful royal romance which has never ceased to stir the hearts of the English people. 

When Queen Victoria inherited the British throne in 1837, just a few weeks after her 18^_th birthday, she was a passionate young woman, both open-minded and faithful to the highest human and Christian values. Immediately, according to the custom of the times, her mother and the government busied themselves with finding a suitable husband for a Queen of England. They chose her cousin, Prince Ernest, the older son of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. But then Victoria flatly refused. The world would discover during her long reign (63 years) that she was a woman who knew what she wanted. And what she wanted in this instance was to marry for love. Now she was in love with Ernest’s younger brother, Albert, who unfortunately was by no means of suitable aristocratic rank. What difference did that make?! She resisted all the pressures, and as soon as she had sufficiently established her power in 1840 certain also that she had the support of the people, who were captivated by her romantic love story—she entered a sacramental union with the man her heart had chosen. Over the course of their 21 years of marriage they were happy and had nine children. 

Besides being highly cultured and religious, both Albert and Victoria were lovers of art and discriminating patrons. Moreover, they themselves were talented and accomplished artists. And so art and the spiritual life were the expressions and the places that they considered most worthy of accounting for the ineffable dimension of their love. On every birthday and wedding anniversary, they presented works of art to each other. So it was that in 1845 Albert gave this Virgin and Child to Victoria as a gift. The following year, they commissioned from the same artist a Saint Joseph, who was to be depicted at the same age as Prince Albert at that time, 27 years old. Having brought these two works together, the royal couple enthroned them as the tutelary image of their union. After the death of the Prince in late 1861—a tragedy from which Victoria never recovered—the Queen had the two paintings hung in her bedroom as ­companion pieces. She contemplated them ceaselessly for forty more years, until her death in 1901. 

When she speaks about this Virgin and Child in her journal, Queen Victoria writes: “This picture is quite like an old master, and in the style of Raphael—so chaste and exquisitely painted.” Indeed, there is no denying the influence of Raphael, in particular of his Small Cowper Madonna, painted in 1505.^₁

Mary the Mother of God is meditating on a passage from chapter 11 of the Book of Isaiah which begins with these words: 

There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.
And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him,
the spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the spirit of counsel and might,
the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. (Is 11:1-2)

In Mary’s arms, a baby to whom his father gave the name of Jesus peers at the Scripture passage also, to find out what ­passage his mother is meditating on, it seems, rather than to learn from it how to become what he is. And look: with a little smile on his lips, he points out to us with his left hand (the hand of the heart), his mother, inasmuch as she has been blessed among all women and chosen to bring him into the world, Him, the unthinkable incarnate fulfillment—and nonetheless the perfect and full, or better, infinitely superabundant fulfillment—of all prophecy. 

1 You can view William Dyce’s Saint Joseph and Raphael’s Small Cowper Madonna on www.magnificat.com/cover.

Pierre-Marie Dumont

The Madonna and Child (1845), William Dyce (1806-1864), Royal Collection Trust, UK. © Royal Collection Trust / His Majesty King Charles III, 2023 / Bridgeman Images.