A postally unused postcard bearing no publisher's name. The card has a divided back.
Osborne House
Osborne House is a former royal residence in East Cowes, Isle of Wight.
The house was built between 1845 and 1851 for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert as a summer home and rural retreat. Prince Albert designed the house himself in the style of an Italian Renaissance palazzo.
The builder was Thomas Cubitt, the London architect and builder whose company built the main façade of Buckingham Palace for the royal couple in 1847.
An earlier smaller house on the site was demolished to make way for the new and far larger house, though the original entrance portico survives as the main gateway to the walled garden.
Queen Victoria died at Osborne House in January 1901. Following her death, the house became surplus to royal requirements and was given to the state, with a few rooms being retained as a private museum to Queen Victoria.
From 1903 until 1921 the house was used as a junior officer training college for the Royal Navy.
In 1998 training programmes consolidated at the Britannia Royal Naval College, now at Dartmouth, thus vacating Osborne House. The House is now open to the public for tours.
State rooms at Osborne House include:
The Durbar Room
Designed by Rudyard Kipling’s father, Lockwood Kipling, and master carver Bhai Ram Singh, this unique room is detailed with intricate Indian-style plaster work to reflect Queen Victoria’s status as Empress of India.
The room was the venue for ceremonial dinners for European royalty and the backdrop to Queen Victoria’s favourite theatrical entertainments. A new banqueting table re-creates the scene of a dinner held in the Durbar Room in the late 19th century, and Indian gifts are displayed in new cabinets.
The survival of exquisite interiors such as the Durbar room has made Osborne a popular venue for filming period pieces. Most recently, the Durbar room featured in the 2017 film 'Victoria and Abdul' by Universal studios and starring Dame Judi Dench and Ali Fazal.
The Dining Room
The Dining Room displays a precise setting of a table laid for the queen’s formal dinners, along with a copy of the exquisite family portrait of Victoria, Albert and her children by Franz Winterhalter.
Franz Xaver Winterhalter (20th. April 1805 – 8th. July 1873) was a German painter and lithographer, known for his flattering portraits of royalty and upper-class society in the mid-19th. century.
His name has become associated with fashionable court portraiture. Among his best known works are Empress Eugénie Surrounded by her Ladies in Waiting (1855) and the portraits he made of Empress Elisabeth of Austria (1865).
It was in this room that Victoria’s body lay in state in 1901, before being taken to her funeral at Windsor.
The Drawing Room
The Drawing Room is decorated sympathetically to the 1890's, with yellow satin curtains, full-length mirrors and a pair of cut-glass chandeliers that were give to Victoria for one of her birthdays.
Foreign royalty were often received in this room on formal occasions, but the queen also used it to play cards, to sing and play the piano with members of the royal household after dinner.
The Billiard Room
In the Billiard Room there is an impressive billiard table by George Magnus, along with William Theed's posthumous bust of Prince Albert.
Separated from the Drawing Room by a columned screen and drawn curtains, the Billiard Room was where the men retired after dinner and could sit on a raised bench while the queen remained in the next room.
The right angled plan of the billiard room, along with its columned screen and curtains, hid it from the adjacent drawing room. Technically, men were required to stand unless given permission to sit in the queen's presence.
The Council Room
The Council Room was used most frequently for entertaining, including dancing, games of charades and drama.
It was here that Queen Victoria gave Prince Albert the title 'Prince Consort', and where Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated his new invention - the telephone - to the queen.
Edinburgh-born inventor Alexander Graham Bell had long been working on experiments involving the transmission of sounds by using electricity.
By 1876 he had come up with a primitive but usable telephone. On the 14th. January 1878 - less than two years after it had been patented - Bell gave a two and a half hour demonstration of his wondrous new invention in the Council Room at Osborne.
Using the telephone, an impressed Victoria was able to converse with others as far as Southampton and London. This is now generally regarded as the introduction of the telephone to Great Britain.
The Audience Room
The Audience Room, with its array of sumptuous original furnishings, was where the ministers of the Privy Council gathered before their meetings with the queen in the Council Room.
In the centre of the room hangs a remarkable chandelier representing arum lilies and convolvulus, Albert's favourite flower.
Use Flickriver Badge Creator to create a badge linking to your photos, your group or any other Flickriver view.
You can place your badge on your Flickr profile, Blog or Website.
Add to your iGoogle or Netvibes page
Flickriver widget for iGoogle or Netvibes can display almost any Flickriver view - most interesting today, by user, by group, by tag etc. Once added to your personalized homepage, just edit widget settings to select your desired view.
Clickr on one of the buttons below to install:
Embed on your Web site
To embed this view, Copy and Paste the following HTML code:
Add 'Search on Flickriver' to your browser's search box. Works with Firefox and Internet Explorer.
Install search plugin
"View on Flickriver" Greasemonkey script
A Greasemonkey script that adds Flickriver links to various Flickr photo pages - user photos, favorites, pools etc, allowing to quickly open the corresponding Flickriver view.
Also, allows quickly viewing any Flickr photo on black background in large size.
