A right royal collection

The best-known exchange between artist and royalty must be George VI’s celebrated remark to John Piper, who had been painting the castle and surrounding parkland at Windsor: ‘You seem to have had very bad luck with your weather.’ It was the early 1940s, and Piper had invested his watercolours with a brooding quality he no doubt thought appropriate to the mood of the times, and which also echoed his own essentially Romantic vision. The project was a commission from Queen Elizabeth, and extended to 26 views, a rare feat of modern topography that also turned out to be good art. But even the Queen thought Piper’s lowering skies a little overbearing, and reportedly suggested he might ‘try a spring day’.

Usually, however, her passion for collecting art was confined to the purchase of existing works of art, rather than commissions, which was in many ways more supportive of the artists, being a direct encouragement of their efforts. As Kenneth Clark, Surveyor of the King’s Pictures (1934–44) and a friend and adviser of the Queen, wrote to her in 1938: ‘Under Your Majesty’s patronage British painters will have a new confidence, because you will make them feel that they are not working for a small clique but for the centre of the national life.’

From childhood onwards, Queen Elizabeth displayed an interest in art which blossomed into real enthusiasm as she grew older. Her most intense period of collecting inevitably took place in the years of King George VI’s reign — 1937 to 1952 — when personal pleasure in the activity was mingled with royal duty. But the fact that her acquisition of art was by no means confined to these years attests to her very real love for painting and drawing.