Shaping Royal Image through Repurposed Royal Residences in the Late Nineteenth Century: Queen Victoria’s Museum at Kensington Palace

On Queen Victoria’s eightieth birthday, 24 May 1899, the State Apartments at Kensington Palace, the Queen’s childhood home, opened to public visitors. As the nineteenth century drew towards its end, and aware of her own mortality, the restoration of the palace and the representation of the State Apartments provided an opportunity for the Queen, as a proactive curator, to construct a visual narrative of her reign and signal the relationship she sought between monarch and subject within spaces redolent with and conditioned by her life narrative. With the Queen’s encouragement, and under the aegis of Liberal politician and courtier Lord Esher, paintings and other artefacts were gathered to position her within the royal lineage and international dynastic networks. They celebrate her reign as the culmination of nineteenth-century British imperial ambition, and reflect and recast her personal history. The nature of the re-presentation of the State Apartments at Kensington Palace and the impact they had on early visitors is compared to the visitor experience at Osborne House, another royal home closely associated with the Queen’s history, which opened to public visitors following a state-managed restoration shortly after the Queen’s death.