Osborne House, and Ventnor

Somewhere I've wanted to go for a very, very long time is Osborne House, which was Queen Victoria's holiday home (plus Balmoral ... she had a choice ...). This was designed by Prince Albert in full-on Italianate villa style.

Indeed, one of the things that comes across most strongly is what a remarkable man Prince Albert was - and also - and I'd never fully internalized this before - how he, and his family, and then later family connections, imposed such a Germanic/mittelEuropean taste - endless German artists, but so much Sèvres china, and sub-late-Baroque gilded things - much of it was not at all what one thinks of as "Victorian," other than endless, endless portraits and statuettes of dogs ... 

What in particular I wanted to see, and it didn't disappoint, was the ornate, Indian Durbar room -

and all the cases full of elaborate gifts and petitions to the Empress Victoria from her Indian subjects on the occasions of her Jubilees.

and also the many, many portraits by Rudolf Swoboda (the middle European, again) of Indians in India - one of the ways QV got to know "her people" in a country she never visited - and of Indian participants in the 1886 Indian and Colonial exhibition in London, and, as here, of Indian servants at Osborne House.

But what I hadn't expected, and was super interesting, was this 2021 painting (after a photo by Camille Silvy) of Sarah (Aina) Forbes Bonetta Davies, by Hannah Uzor, a Yoruban girl who became QV's protégée after being rescued from captivity in 1850 - a complex and multi-layered history of identity.

But the whole house was weirdly curated.  Many, but by no means all, of the paintings had sensible, if brief contextualizing wall panels.  But not the sculptures - who's this badly pouting figure?

And who might she be, in the corridor outside the Durbar Room?

In other notes, I need never again feel bad about having too many things on my desk ...

the gardens are wonderful;

Here's QV's bathing hut ... so improbable to think of her emerging into the water in a swimming costume, however decorous ...

... and then a couple of buses over to the other side of the island, to Ventnor, which is a respectably shabby Victorian seaside resort, caught in numerous time warps. Here's the view from my rooom's balcony;

the B & B itself is the big grey house on the left, above the very Victorian Cascade.

And here's the beach - complete with more bathing huts -

This just screams British Seaside Resort -

And then the most remarkable thing of all - this B&B has, downstairs, a Michelin-rated restaurant - just 9 tables, and perfect.