Albert, Prince Consort

Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (August 26, 1819 – December 14, 1861) was the husband of Queen Victoria. He was interested in the arts, science and technology, and led the Great Exhibition project in 1851. After his death in 1861, Queen Victoria spent the rest of her life in mourning, and always wore black.

Prince Albert in later life

Quotes

• The works of art, by being publicly exhibited and offered for sale, are becoming articles of trade, following as such the unreasoning laws of markets and fashion; and public and even private patronage is swayed by their tyrannical influence.
  • "Albert, Prince" The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Ed. Elizabeth Knowles. Oxford University Press, 2004. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Accessed on 20 November 2008
• Nobody who has paid any attention to the peculiar features of our present era will doubt for a moment that we are living at a period of most wonderful transition which tends rapidly to the accomplishment that great end to which, indeed, all history points—the realization of the unity of mankind. ...The distances which separated the different nations and parts of the globe are rapidly vanishing before the achievements of modern invention, and we can traverse them with incredible ease; the languages of all nations are known, and their acquirement placed within the reach of everybody; thought is communicated with the rapidity and even by the power of lightning... The knowledge acquired becomes at once the property of all of the community at large... no sooner is a discovery or invention made, than it is already improved upon and surpassed by competing efforts: the products of all quarters of the globe are placed at our disposal, and we have only to choose which is the best and the cheapest for our purposes, and the powers of production are entrusted to the stimulus of competition and capital. ...Science discovers these laws of power, motion and transformation; industry applies them to raw matter which the earth yields us in abundance, but which becomes valuable only by knowledge.
  • Inaugural Address of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, London (1851)
• I conceive it to be the duty of every educated person closely to watch and study the time in which he lives, and, as far as in him lies, to add his humble mite of individual exertion to further the accomplishment of what he believes Providence to have ordained.
  • Speech of the Prince Consort at the Mansion House, 21 Mar. 1850, in The Principal Speeches and Addresses of H.R.H. the Prince Consort (John Murray, 1862), p. 109-110
• The production of all works in art or poetry requires, in their conception and execution, not only an exercise of the intellect, skill, and patience, but particularly a concurrent warmth of feeling and a free flow of imagination. This renders them most tender plants, which will thrive only in an atmosphere calculated to maintain that warmth, and that atmosphere is one of kindness—kindness towards the artist personally as well as towards his production. An unkind word of criticism passes like a cold blast over their tender shoots, and shrivels them up, checking the flow of the sap, which was rising to produce, perhaps, multitudes of flowers and fruit.
  • Speech at the Royal Academy Dinner, 3 May 1851, in The Principal Speeches and Addresses of H.R.H. the Prince Consort (John Murray, 1862), p. 128