Review of the portrait of Princess Alice by F.X. Winterhalter (1857)
“The likeness of Princess Alice, taken in 1857, by the Court painter, Herr Winterhalter, presents to our eyes a well-grown young lady of fourteen, who, as the novelists say, might be older. It is a fact very humiliating to physiognomists that the character and expression of a face are greatly influenced by the arrangement of the hair; and we suppose this is the reason why we are not forcibly struck by the resemblance of the young Princess to her parents.
“Nevertheless, we can with little difficulty trace in these delicate features certain general repetitions of the family type. There are “the ripe Guelph cheek and the straight Coburg brow,” though the former is less Guelphic in its ripeness than we have observed to be the case with other cheeks among princes of the blood royal, while the Coburg brow loses a little of its individuality by the partial adoption of a coiffure recently in vogue at the Tuileries.
“Mr Lane has considerately softened the harsh materialism, and modified the Dutch flatness which are so distinctive of the Winterhalter school of painting; and at the same time he has preserved all the best qualities belonging to an artist who is inspired with no comprehensive or elevated ideas of human life.” [See cat. no. 582]
© “Lithographic Portraits of the Royal Family.” Daily News, 22 November 1859, 3.
The Winterhalter Catalogue 