Rare Floral Paintings By Queen Victoria Head To Auction

Fancy decorating your home with artwork by a royal? A rare set of floral canvases personally painted by Queen Victoria are going up for sale at Hansons Auctioneers in London, and are expected to fetch between £8,000 and £10,000 (US$9,870 and US$12,340) each.

According to the auction house, the British Monarch’s paintings were purchased decades ago by the seller’s grandfather, and come with a letter of provenance in which Queen Victoria’s last surviving grandson, Alexander Mountbatten, identified the portraits as her work. 

The Evening Standard reported that the two pieces—both depicting colorful flowers—may date back as far as the latter half of the 19th century, and are known to have been bought over by a private collector in 1945 when artifacts from the monarch’s holiday home went on sale. 

Going under the hammer alongside the paintings will be a letterbox once owned by the Queen, which the seller’s grandfather had acquired together with the artworks. Hansons’ estimates it will go for £4,000 to £6,000 (US$4,900 to US$7,400).

As Artnet News noted, Queen Victoria’s work has rarely shown up at auctions, with only 15 recorded lots ever going up for sale. Interestingly, five of them had failed to find a buyer, including the most recent piece up for grabs—a watercolor of Prince Edward and Prince Alfred. 

The auction record for a piece painted by the royal stands at £30,000 (US$45,038) in the Artnet Price Database, which went to an oil painting of the head of a maid, sold at Christie’s London in 2015. 

If the two floral canvases—a stark contrast to the lady who was known to have dressed in all black following her husband’s death—are to go for their estimated prices, they could likely become the monarch’s third-highest sale thus far. 

“We hear a lot about King Charles’s paintings so it’s particularly interesting to see work by his ancestor, Queen Victoria. According to the Royal Collection Trust, domestic life provided a common subject for her watercolors and drawings,” says Chris Kirkham, Associate Director of Hansons London. 

[via Artnet News, Evening Standard, and Hansons Auctioneers, images via Hansons Auctioneers]