The Tansey Miniatures Foundation

Die Miniatur Über den Künstler

The Tansey Miniatures Foundation

DE
The Miniature About the Artist

Sophie Charlotte, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, Electress and Queen of Hanover

Ernst Heinrich Abel

Sophia Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (1744-1818) married King George III of Great Britain and Ireland in 1761, the year after his accession to the throne.

Since 1714 Great Britain had been joined in personal union to the Welf Electorate of Hanover. The wedding ceremony took place in the Chapel Royal of St. James's Palace and the couple were crowned in Westminster Abbey two weeks later. As usual in marriages for dynastic reasons, husband and wife had not met before their wedding. However, they had possibly seen miniatures of each other, which were often idealized according to contemporary taste. In fact, it is recorded that Sophia Charlotte's appearance was rather plain. Although their marriage was increasingly overshadowed by the king's mental illness since the late 1780s, it was a happy alliance with fifteen children. After Hanover had been elevated to the rank of a kingdom in the wake of the Congress of Vienna in 1814/15, Sophia Charlotte also bore the title "Queen of Hanover".

This miniature was created two years after the marriage and shows an austere face with a high forehead and a strong nose.

1 The light colouring is painted with delicate, green-grey dotted shadings and the details of the gown are very delicately reproduced, too.

J. S. O.

1 Whereas she was stylized as the ideal queen in the later portraits – such as the famous full-body painting by Thomas Gainsborough from 1781 (The Royal Collection, London) – the portraits created soon after the wedding may well be compared to the miniature portrait on a snuff box, approx. 1761 (The Royal Collection, London, RCIN 43892), or Sophia Charlotte with her son Edward August, born in 1767 (The Royal Collection, London, RCIN 452805).