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Sketch Attributed to Queen Victoria Comes to Auction

A grisaille sketch in ink and wash, depicting a deer in a landscape with accompanying inscription 'from the Queen's blotting book, Scone Palace' will be offered as lot 302 in the forthcoming Winter Auction, with an estimate of £500-£1000.

 

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert stayed at Scone Palace with the 4th Earl of Mansfield on 6th September 1842, during their first visit to Scotland. The royal tour, which lasted two weeks, was largely organised by the 5th Duke of Buccleuch, Lord Lieutenant of the County of Midlothian and Gold Stick of Scotland, and his wife Charlotte, who was Queen Victoria's Mistress of the Robes, in conjunction with the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel.  

 

Victoria described Scone in a letter to her uncle Leopold, King of the Belgians, as "fine, but rather gloomy". A watercolour of Scone by William Leighton Leitch was later presented to Victoria and Albert as a souvenir of their visit. In 1846, Leitch became drawing master to Her Majesty and The Royal Family, a post he held for twenty two years.  

 

The Queen was a keen artist, with animals providing a common subject for the Monarch's watercolours and drawings. In 1847, on another trip to Scotland, The Queen produced a pencil drawing of a stag in a highland landscape, after Edwin Henry Landseer's mural on the drawing room wall at Ardverikie Shooting Lodge.

 

For more information, please contact Pictures Specialist, John Holmes