Another pose from the same sitting.

Despite her influence among the Central European principalities, it still took Queen Victoria almost a decade to find a suitable match for her generously proportioned cousin, and she was nearly forced to concede to her Foreign Secretary, Lord Clarendon, that 'no German Prince will venture so vast an undertaking'. In the end, at the age of thirty, Mary married the impecunious Prince of Teck.

Having finally entered the state of matrimony, the Princess lived well beyond her means, amounting huge debts in her new-found rôle as a hostess of London society. She was eventually persuaded to economize and in 1883, with her husband and four children, went to live in Florence, where she lived in a style almost as opulent as that which she had enjoyed in London.