Danish-British Consort Portraiture, c.1600-1900 by Sara Ayres

Author:Sara Ayres
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lund Humphries
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

43 Peder Als, Christian VII of Denmark (c.1766–8), oil on canvas, 286 × 197.5 cm, Museum of National History at Frederiksborg Castle, Hillerød, Denmark.

44 Peder Als, Caroline Mathilde in the Uniform of her Life Guards (1770), oil on canvas, 147 × 115 cm, private collection.

45 Peder Als, Sketch C for Christian VII of Denmark (c.1766), pencil and watercolour, 22 × 13.8 cm, Museum of National History at Frederiksborg Castle, Hillerød, Denmark.

The portrait as gift may also commemorate the success of the Struensee party’s ousting of the minister Bernstorff, on 15 September 1770, whose long-term leadership of the Danish bureaucracy rendered him perhaps the most significant power in the land. Plans for this internal coup were apparently laid at Traventhal that summer, and Count Rantzau, a close friend of Struensee, who had recommended him as doctor to the king, had participated in preparing these plans. Bernstorff’s dismissal also enabled the rehabilitation of Rantzau at the Danish court and his subsequent accession to the Council. Bernstorff had made every effort to deter the young king from participating in the administration of Denmark or the development of its policy. British diplomat Robert Murray Keith (1730–1795), envoy to Denmark in 1771–2, wrote of the king:

The late Ministry are said to have neglected no Means of presenting to his Majesty’s youthful Eye, all Business, thro’ the terrifying Medium of Labour and Drudgery. They used many Efforts (and at length they succeeded) to inspire him with a thorough Distaste for every Thing but Ease and Dissipation, with the sole Design of maintaining their own Power and Consequence.55

In the same document Keith reported that the dismissal of Count Bernstorff was specifically precipitated by: ‘– the firm, (tho’ possibly ill-founded), Belief, her Danish Majesty entertains, that while the King was at Travendall, Count Bernstorff sollicited and had almost obtained the Royal Signature to an Act establishing a Regency in the Event of a Minority, by which her Majesty’s undoubted Right would have been set aside.’56 Keith frames the dismissal of Bernstorff, which shocked Europe, so long had he steered Denmark’s ship of state, as a consequence of his excluding the royal couple from power. In this respect Caroline Matilda’s portrait as gift acts not just as a commemoration of Rantzau’s new acquisition of political capital, but as the queen’s expectation of more of the same. This investment did not generate lasting returns, since Count Rantzau actively participated in the palace coup which overthrew Struensee at the beginning of 1772.57 But at the time of its making the portrait of Caroline Matilda in uniform embodied the royal couple as a political Arbeitspaar, returned from the periphery to the centre of power.

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