The Gallery of Beauties (Schonheitengalerie) is a collection of 36 portraits of the most beautiful women from the nobility and middle classes of Munich, Germany, painted between 1827 and 1850 (mostly by Joseph Karl Stieler, appointed court painter in 1820) and gathered by Ludwig I of Bavaria in the south pavilion of his Nymphenburg Palace in Munich.
Two additional ones were created by Friedrich Durck. Its best-known works are the portraits of the shoemaker’s daughter Helene Sedlmayr, the actress Charlotte von Hagn(revered by audiences in Munich, Berlin and Saint Petersburg) and the king’s mistresses Lola Montez and Marianna Marquesa Florenzi. They include a Briton, a Greek, a Scot and an Israelite, along with relations of Ludwig’s – the wife and daughter of Ludwig of Oettingen-Wallerstein were both painted, as was Ludwig I’s daughter Princess Alexandra of Bavaria.
The collection was a late example of a fashion for such series, which includes an earlier one in Munich of beauties of the French court brought back from Versailles by a Bavarian prince who spent a period there. In England there are the Windsor Beauties, eleven paintings of the 1660s by Sir Peter Lely and the Hampton Court Beauties, a later set by Sir Godfrey Kneller.
Year 1828 Cornelia Vetterlein
Year 1841 Sophie Friederike von Bayern
Year 1843 Marie Friederike of Prussia
Year 1844 Emily Milbanke
Year 1827 Auguste Strobl
Year 1828 Amalie von Lerchenfeld
Year 1828 Charlotte von Hagn
Year 1829 Anna Hillmayer
Year 1829 Nanette Kaula
Year 1831 Jane Elizabeth Digby
Year 1831 Amalie von Schintling
Year 1831 Marianna Marquesa Florenzi
Year 1834 Caroline von Holnstein
Year 1840 Rosalie Julie von Bonar
Year 1843 Friederike von Gumppenberg
Year 1844 Josepha Conti 1844
Year 1847 Lola Montez
Year 1850 Maria Dietsch