The art of the monarchy

Elizabeth II spent virtually all her life surrounded by one of the world’s greatest art collections. Even when she was a child, and the likelihood of her inheriting the throne still seemed remote, visits to her grandparents at Buckingham Palace involved looking at pictures, since George V enjoyed showing her the Victorian narrative paintings that hung there, such as William Powell Frith’s ‘Ramsgate Sands’.

Nobody knows exactly how many works of art there are in the Royal Collection, but at the end of Elizabeth II’s reign nearly 300,000 objects had been catalogued online, probably just under a third of the whole. Among the many masterpieces are Andrea Mantegna’s monumental sequence of canvases ‘The Triumph of Caesar’, purchased by Charles I in 1629; nearly 600 drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, including virtually all his anatomical studies; one of the finest Mughal manuscripts, ‘Padshahnama’; no fewer than 52 paintings by Canaletto; and the largest collection of 18th-century Sèvres porcelain outside France.