With all due respect, Heinrich von Angeli did not mince his words.

And frankly recommended his high-born student to change the genre.

The Viennese painter is said to have advised the young Crown Princess Victoria, "Don't do the portraits."

"It just can't.

Let's stick to your still lifes, they make it very nice.” However, as the exhibition in the Kronberg painters' colony museum, which does not focus solely on Victoria's years in the Taunus, shows, the art-loving monarch was anything but talented.

Christopher Schutte

Freelance author in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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Not only had Queen Victoria's daughter enjoyed painting and drawing lessons as a child in England and counted artists such as Edward Henry Corbould, Franz von Lenbach and Angeli and, since she had moved into her widow's residence at Schloss Friedrichshof in 1894, above all Norbert Schrödl among her teachers.

The later Empress Friedrich (1840 –1901), as Victoria called herself after the death of her husband, obviously had her own mind too – and took the portraits of her children like those of Waldemar, Victoria or Margarethe, who later died young, and the later princess of Hesse and near the Rhine, the Angeli, who had been identified as a portrait painter, quickly became a model.

But even if the exhibition deals with a downright touching, at the age of 13, her future husband Friedrich III.

dedicated watercolor drawing, with the portraits and a still life created in Kronberg – not denying Schrödl’s teacher – with a series of Kronberg motifs as well as the landscape watercolors created on her trips to Italy, which have never been shown before, initially interested primarily in the painter Victoria: “Empress Friedrich and the Arts” is no coincidence that the show is titled.

The presentation is less about satisfying the secret curiosity of an audience that is primarily interested in a possibly glamorous royal work.

Passionate amateur painter

And staging Empress Friedrich as an underestimated painter, as a protagonist of modernism, is something that the exhibition, developed in cooperation with the Cultural Foundation of the House of Hesse, does not even come up with.

It is above all the way curator Ingrid Ehrhardt puts the imperial art into context with numerous works from her own collection that makes a second or third visit to the exhibition seem worthwhile.

Which is why the show not only finds its precise conclusion in the permanent collection of the house with Ferdinand Brütt's "Laying out of the Empress Friedrich in the Johanniskirche in Kronberg".

And in connection with this, a recently acquired oil study for Brütt's large-format painting can also show.

The presentation also succeeds with the portraits of his own daughters, as painted by the Kronberg painter prince Anton Burger, a hunting still life by Mathilde Knoop-Spielhagen - who was married to the court doctor of the empress - and with the works of Schrödl, Brütt and Adolf Schreyer again and again to follow Victoria's work in Kronberg.

As a patron as well as a passionately dilettante painter and knowledgeable collector.

After all, since 1894 the empress had lived mainly in the Taunus.

And thus despite the extensive property Schloss Friedrichshof, which is now run as a hotel by the Hessian House Foundation, in the immediate vicinity of the artists who founded the Kronberg painters' colony in the middle of the 19th century.

Of course, it has not been handed down that she set up her easel on the surrounding hills to paint in the changing seasons in front of nature, like the open-air painters Burger, Peter Burnitz or Emil Rumpf, who wandered through the Taunus and emulated the example of the Barbizon colonists .

However, she maintained a lively exchange with some of the "Kronbergers" such as Norbert Schrödl, whom she knew from Berlin and in whose studio she eagerly took painting lessons.

Even more, if one believes the descriptions of his wife Else - "The Empress now comes to paint every day," she noted in her diary in the summer of 1896 - then one would almost like to call the relationship friendly.

As far as such was possible in view of the etiquette.

It may be that Schrödl's 1898 portrait of Victoria from the Frankfurt Städel appears a little idealized.

In fact, however, the painter comes astonishingly close to the empress here.

And looks at his model with empathy.

Empress Friedrich and the Arts in the Museum Kronberger Malerkolonie, Kronberg, Heinrich-Winter-Straße 4a, is open until March 5th.

The museum is closed on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year's Eve and New Year's Day.