Hungarian Portraits of Queen Elizabeth

An Iconographic Outline

Abstract

Although the monarch's wife played no real role in Hungarian and imperial public law in the 19th century, Queen Elizabeth began to appear more and more frequently on the walls of public institutions from the end of the 1860s, when she became politically active. The most common visual source of portraits was Emil Rabending's series of photographs of the empress in Hungarian costume in 1866. After the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, Elizabeth did not play an active role in Hungarian public life, although she continued to make gestures. No photographs of her were taken from the late 1860s. Images of a young Elizabeth in Hungarian dress became increasingly common in Hungary. Thus, after her death, the transition from representative portraits to memorials was almost uninterrupted. Among the posthumous portraits of the Queen, the paintings commissioned by the king from Hungarian artists as gifts for Elizabeth's former ladies-in-waiting are exceptional. All are of the elderly 'civilian' queen, and Gyula Benczúr's portrait for Ida Ferenczy has become one of the best-known images of Elizabeth in Hungary.

Photo: Wikipedia