The ball at Devonshire House was the last royal reception of its kind in the history of Great Britain. It took place on July 2, 1897, to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, commemorating the 60th anniversary of her reign. The invited guests, who represented the social elite of Great Britain, had their likenesses captured in photographs.
The exhibition comprises 53 photographs from the Lafayette Studio Archive at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, one of the most significant British collections of glass negatives from the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, supplemented by one photograph from the Royal Archives in Windsor. They are accompanied by texts describing the figures and analyzing the highly intricate costumes and the wealth of jewels.
The portraits of the participants in the ball organized by Duchess Louisa of Devonshire show them at the height of their social standing, while their lavish costumes testify to exceptional wealth. Photographs of figures in costumes inspired by the East and the West draw viewers into the invited guests’ world of ideas about the literature, opera, theatre, poetry and painting of past centuries. The ball’s participants took on the roles of great historical and legendary figures, such as Cleopatra, Semiramis and the Queen of Sheba, as well as mythological, literary and historical personalities of the Western world, including Mars, Beatrice, King Richard the Lionheart and Admiral Horatio Nelson.
The exhibition is completed by four historical costumes meticulously and expertly reconstructed on the basis of photographs from the Lafayette Archive. Their creators are graduates of Wimbledon College of Art in London. One of the participants in the grand ball in 1897 was Princess Daisy, the wife of Prince Hans Heinrich XV von Hochberg, lord of Książ and Pszczyna. Her story is brought closer in the film “Daisy – A Remembrance of a Bygone World,” presented as part of the exhibition.
Muzeum Miedzi/ii