Palaces and Pleasuredomes Art, Passion & Power: The Story of the Royal Collection

Have you ever wondered how you'd impress a king?

If you're at Buckingham Palace,

and the King of Spain is coming to dinner,

the first thing you do is get out your best tableware.

In particular, you polish up the Grand Service,

one of the greatest treasures of the Royal Collection

and, then, you let it do its work.

The Grand Service,

4,000 pieces, silver-gilt, 25 years in the making -

far more than table ornament.

Many of these pieces could really be described as sculpture.

What an astonishing thing!

It's a national monument.

Look closer and there's marvel in every detail.

Clam-shaped tureens,

candelabra with piping forms.

It all reflects the personality of the man who commissioned it -

George IV, a king for whom too much was never enough

and who was responsible for so much of the trappings of the modern

monarchy. Before him, royal ceremony was polite theatre.

After him, it was opera.

I'm exploring the Royal Collection,

that extraordinary accumulation

of art and objects owned by the monarchy

and I've reached the late 18th and early 19th centuries

and the most romantic royal collectors in history.

There's George IV but also the royal couple who closely followed him -

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert,

for whom art served almost as a marital aid.

This is a fantastically accomplished piece of high Victorian soft porn.

Through their collections, we see them as lovers, rulers,

diplomats and - sometimes - flawed individuals.

But they purchased and commissioned

some of the greatest works of art of all time.

Between them, George IV,

Queen Victoria and Albert turned the first half of the 19th century into

the greatest age of royal collecting since the time of Charles I

and, unlike Charles's collection,

theirs have remained largely intact into the present

and, in fact, when the monarchy today wants to put on a show,

it's THEIR stuff that's brought out, polished and set on the table.

"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

"A stately pleasure dome decree

"Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

"Through caverns measureless to man

"Down to a sunless sea."

Coleridge, in his opium dreams,

merely wrote about the great palace of an Oriental potentate.

But George IV, whose name I would add to any roll call

of great romantics, went one better - he built his own.

The Royal Pavilion in Brighton -

a self-portrait in stone of a man

who lived his whole life as if it were a work of art.

A pleasure dome, indeed.

So, welcome to the house that George built.

Welcome to the house of fun!

Everything in here is pure theatre.

Look at this wonderful, Chinese-style chandelier

designed by George's interior decorators, the Craces.

And these rather wonderful Qing dynasty figurines,

they give you a little hint as to George's mischievous sense of fun.

They nod at you, and it's said that George used to like to do that

to all of these figurines just before guests arrived,

so that when they came in to this long gallery,

they'd do a double-take and think, "Did that sculpture just move?

"Is it alive? Who knows?"

These figures, like many other objects here,

are owned by the Queen

and are on long term loan from the Royal Collection.

The walls have been papered so that they resemble a garden -

what looks like marble is actually just paint...

..and, if you continue on to this rather wonderful staircase...

..this looks like bamboo but, actually, it's made of wrought iron,

whereas this, the handrail, is mahogany carved to look like bamboo.

How perverse is that?

But all of that, the long gallery, is really

an avenue of anticipation,

a build-up, a build-up to the great climax,

the coup de theatre,

the piece of resistance, which is the banqueting room.

The richest, most luxuriously decorated space

created in all of 19th-century England.

It's bewildering, breathtaking.

The designer was a man called Robert Jones.

If only he were alive today,

just imagine how Elton John's house would look.

Fantastic!

That is the largest, most splendid and extraordinary chandelier.

It's held in place by this astonishing Jabberwock of a dragon.

The pavilion began as a spare and trim neoclassical building but it

expanded in tandem with the royal waistline,

becoming more outlandish as George put ever more distance

between himself and the ordered, 18th-century world of his youth,

dominated by his father, George III.

Think of George III, collector of clocks,

a man of the Enlightenment, obsessed with order, decorum, rules,

punctuality. Well!

George IV just says no to all of that

and I think that's what this building symbolises

more than anything else. It's a great act of rebellion

against everything that his father stood for.

In here, underneath that glittering dome,

in this fantasy world, he can enjoy his latest fling,

open ten or 20 bottles of very good Bordeaux and time would stand still.

He would be free.

Freedom came at a price.

George's excessive consumption wasn't nearly matched by his income.

Parliament was constantly bailing him out,

even forcing him to marry in exchange for writing off hundreds of

thousands of pounds of debt.

George has been remembered as extravagant and profligate,

a thoroughly rotten apple in the barrel of monarchy

but is that fair?

Yes, he spent fortunes and, no, he didn't always pay his bills.

But the truth is that if you added up the value of all of the objects

that he bought and brought into the Royal Collection,

you'd find that for every £1,000 he spent, you'd have £10 million

of value in modern money.

As Prince of Wales,

George commissioned a series of paintings from George Stubbs.

You could pick up a Stubbs for around 60 quid in the 1790s.

They're worth up to £20 million these days

and George bought over a dozen.

And these are two of the real pinnacles.

I love this one.

It's a sort of picture of George IV who isn't there.

What it shows us is the preparations being made

for him to take a trip in his carriage.

This particular type of carriage is known as a phaeton.

Here's his head coachman.

The horses have been groomed and he's calming one of them,

holding him by the bridle.

He's a man called Samuel Thomas -

stout, with his red face and an expression of infinite patience.

He's a man used to waiting for his master.

Down here, we've got George's rather mischievous dog, Fino.

Trust George to have a dog named after a type of sherry -

trying his best, as he rears up, trying to startle the second horse,

who, for the moment, isn't playing along.

It's a wonderful picture.

In the other painting, we see George himself,

out riding, in London,

by the side of the Serpentine.

He's in Hyde Park. He's multitasking.

He's giving his horse some exercise

while walking his dogs at the same time.

What's most interesting is his costume.

The buff trouser and navy blue frock coat

were the uniform of the radical

Whig opposition, champions of liberty,

adversaries of the Government of King George III.

This was George's way of saying that "I'm sympathetic to the Whig cause,

"and I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the ideas of that group

"over the Channel, the French revolutionaries."

If you look at the date of the picture down here,

you can see it was painted in 1791,

so this is before Madame Guillotine has come on the scene.

It's still safe, if you like,

to feel some sympathy for the revolutionary cause.

It's definitely a picture that shows how much like Blake,

like Wordsworth,

he's thinking about himself, as someone living in a new age.

The execution of the French king two years later put an end to George's

flirtations with radicalism.

But France, or specifically French aristocratic and royal taste,

would be a constant throughout his life,

and on display at his main residence as Prince of Wales -

Carlton House.

Nothing of Carlton House remains at the bottom of Regent Street

where it once stood but you can witness its splendour

in a series of watercolours in the Royal Collection.

Visitors pass through an entrance at Pall Mall and then into principal

rooms that included the rose satin drawing room hung with silk,

and decorated with portraits of Rubens and van Dyck,

the vast crimson drawing room with a carpet of light blue velvet

and a magnificent throne room.

Carlton House was torn down in George's lifetime,

so what happened to the things that were in it?

Have a guess.

And if you really want to see George IV's collection

at its very best, you have to come to this royal residence

tucked away in the heart of London -

Buckingham Palace.

This was another of George's building projects.

The state rooms are decorated with many of his sensuous furnishings.

It's so camp here, so OTT,

so French,

that you have to pinch yourself to remember

that you're at the centre of the British state.

Royal Collection Trust's Rufus Bird

is responsible for the Palace furniture.

So, this is a sofa or a canape, as it's called in French,

made in the late 18th century in France and is one of three sets.

One set was supplied to Louis XVI, another to

Marie Antoinette and this, the third set,

supplied to George, Prince of Wales.

The French furniture maker must be very pleased

in the immediate post-Revolutionary period, I mean,

suddenly to get a commission from George must help a bit.

-Yes.

-Who was his principal furniture dealer?

So, he used this guy called Dominique Daguerre,

who is a very important person

for creating some of these assemblages in Carlton House

and he is a marchand-mercier,

a sort of person who could bring together craftsmen

and create a work of art.

Were any of these things brought by him, or all of these things?

Yeah, pretty much everything, actually.

I want to show you something here. If you have a look underneath here,

I'll move this out the way and if we look underneath, you can see...

-Oh, there's a sort of sticker.

-Yes, there's a label. It says,

"Monsieur Daguerre. Canape pour le sallon."

So, there we have.

-For the removal man. So he knows where to put it.

-Exactly.

-He knows exactly where to put it.

-In Carlton House.

-In Carlton House.

Daguerre received £14,500 in a single year

for fitting out Carlton House,

supplying items such as this cabinet.

Wow! It's just fantastic.

The panels are pietra dura,

so that's the Italian inlaid stone technique

which you can almost not believe when you look at that tulip.

And the other one I love is this one.

I mean, it's just... I've never seen anything like it!

This feels like a cornucopia in the form of a piece of furniture.

-It sort of spills out into the room, almost.

-It does, yeah.

This three-dimensionality here of these plaques is incredible.

When it was made, around 1787,

this belonged to a famous opera singer called Madame La Guerre

who died very young of a very exciting life.

She died of a very exciting life! OK.

Let's draw a veil over that.

Poor Madame La Guerre. But it gives you a sense,

-he really is buying the very, very top-end stuff from France.

-Yes.

In the white drawing room is one of George's greatest purchases

from late in his life,

a writing desk by the furniture maker Jean-Henri Riesener,

supplier to the French court in the years before the revolution.

So, when George IV bought this,

it was sold to him as having come from Versailles.

There is nothing on this, and we've looked,

that suggests that it was in Versailles.

There are no markings on it whatsoever.

Do you think it was Versailles, yourself? What's your hunch?

Yeah, I do. There's two others of this exact type,

one of which has got emblems of the sisters of Louis XV.

So, it's almost like in the Soviet era,

-where they used to take people out of photographs.

-Yes, yes, exactly.

They've taken...the royal coat of arms has been removed,

so that the object is no longer tainted

by the smell of a fallen monarchy.

-Yeah, well, it was then saleable.

-What does it do?

Well, I was just going to say, would you like to have a look inside?

-I'd love to.

-I'm just going to don my white gloves.

-I love pieces of furniture that open...

-Yeah.

..and then reveal secrets within.

I'm a sucker for it. Here you can...

Well, if you're French, you can write your billet-doux,

and arrange your liaisons dangereuses and if you're George,

I suppose you might write some letters.

There's a reading slope.

Wow. That's brilliant!

This is just what I need. That's so clever.

Yeah.

One of the themes running through George's collection is very much

this connection with the ancien regime.

What do you think it is that obsesses and fascinates George?

I think he's interested in this idea of the romantic, lost collections,

and then of course, come the revolution,

they were guillotined and then the collections were dispersed.

So, there's this sense of romance.

Now, there's also a practical side, because, of course,

the collections are on the market and so he's able to buy them,

and not everybody was capable of doing that.

Of course, George didn't just buy furniture.

Some of the very greatest paintings in the Royal Collection were bought

by him, including many here at Buckingham Palace.

And, yet again, he had those revolutionaries

over the Channel to thank.

To paraphrase Wordsworth, "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,"

but to be a young art collector was very heaven.

The great, French, aristocratic picture collections

were brought to London

and they went under the hammer and who was there to buy them?

The future George IV, the Prince of Wales,

the right man in the right place at the right time.

As French armies overran the low countries,

many Dutch collections also found their way

to the only stable country in Europe - Britain.

With his connoisseur's eye,

George snaffled up a collection of Dutch and Flemish masters

that's simply one of the greatest in the world.

And what a picture this is, by Cuyp.

A picture that's all about light and the depiction of light.

Look at that sky with its shredded cloudage, lit by the evening sun,

the silhouettes of birds flying through the sky.

The peasant on his mule, homeward bound.

Look at all this. Look at this foreground.

The foliage speckled by light.

He's actually created that by flicking the canvas.

It's almost like a Chinese technique,

and what's really interesting is that we know that Constable,

the great English Romantic,

he looked at Cuyp, he was obsessed by Cuyp

and he did exactly the same thing.

He created this thin. He called it his snow, "my snow,"

and he flicked paint onto the surface of the canvas

and that was really the fundamental origins

of expressionist approaches to painting -

ultimately, it then goes into expressionism and Jackson Pollock

is the perfect example of it.

So, this is really, at a technical level, a fantastically

adventurous piece of painting.

It's a real masterpiece.

Again, one of the very greatest paintings by Cuyp.

George finally became king aged 57, in 1820...

..and, at first, it seemed as if little had changed.

This was a spendaholic monarch

who didn't consider his coronation banquet complete

without the presence of a knight on horseback.

# Zadok the priest

# And Nathan the prophet

# Anointed... #

But I think that, in his maturity,

George did finally work out how to channel his natural showmanship

to a higher purpose - the stabilising power of monarchy.

In 1822, George went to Edinburgh

and proved once and for all his mastery of royal spectacle.

Scotland was a land where memories of the brutal suppression

of the 1745 Jacobite uprising was still raw.

No Hanoverian king had ever dared to set foot north of the border.

A central set piece of the visit was the king's arrival at the old royal

Palace of Holyroodhouse,

an event important enough to be commemorated by an eyewitness -

the leading Scottish painter, David Wilkie, in a work

that I'm being shown by Royal Collection Trust's Deborah Clarke.

Aha, here it is.

A real piece of history.

He's painted George looking rather pale and I've always wondered

if that wasn't something to do with the fact

that he's just got off a boat.

Apparently, the weather was very bad and he's a little bit seasick,

or perhaps I'm just imagining that!

It might have had something to do with it but also,

it was the king who commissioned this picture

and had a say in what Wilkie

was to paint, because Wilkie was determined to paint something for

the king. The king asked him to paint a scene from the visit

and he couldn't quite work out what to do and it was the king who said,

"I want to be shown at the palace of my ancestors."

And the person who orchestrated it all is Walter Scott,

who I'm expecting to see among these people

but I can't work out which one of them he might be.

You can just see him by the front door of the palace.

He's this rather sort of shadowy figure in profile.

Looking rather medieval, I suppose, as you might expect.

Absolutely. He was given three weeks to arrange the visit,

so not a great deal of time

and decided to really go for it, go for all the pageantry.

Fascinating. So, let's look at some of the other details,

cos there are one or two things that puzzle me.

I can see the pageantry that you talk about - Scott's pageantry -

those men on horseback wearing their splendid costumes

but, behind them, there looks to be a kind of

fire blazing in the distance. What would that be?

Well, what you have to remember, in those days,

there was no way of knowing exactly when the king was due to arrive.

People were on tenterhooks for days.

Even Wilkie himself wrote, "I must wait in the city.

"I can't leave cos I don't know when the king is due to arrive."

-So, are you saying that fire is a beacon?

-It's a beacon.

-Brilliant!

-So, finally, he'd arrived and the beacons were lit.

Walter Scott marketed George as a hero from one of his novels.

One very lucky Edinburgh clothier received a commission for £1,354

to kit the king out in a fantastical version of Highland costume.

The typically understated accessories

still remain in the Royal Collection

and when David Wilkie painted George in the outfit, he said the king

reminded him of a giant sausage in tartan.

Nevertheless, the visit was a great success.

It was said a seventh of the entire population of Scotland

turned out to greet the king.

And when I read about the hubbub,

I'm reminded of today's royal pageantry,

the weddings and christenings

that are such a part of our national life.

And the crowds weren't just in the streets, they were up there -

every window, every balcony was packed.

So much banner and flag-waving

was there that the walls themselves seemed

to ripple and one lady, watching it all from a first-floor window,

wrote in her diary that "The most remarkable thing is perhaps not

"the plump gentleman in his coach,

"but the multitude seething around him."

It's as if the crowd had itself become the spectacle.

Scotland had been brought together to see its own togetherness.

400 miles south, a great symbol of British royalty

was getting an upgrade.

In the 1820s,

nearly £1 million was spent turning the draughty castle at Windsor

into a Gothic redoubt from the pages of Walter Scott.

This was George's statement of the enduring and stabilising power

of monarchy.

The Round Tower at Windsor -

its silhouette has appeared on a million postcards.

It's become the trademark, almost, of the monarchy -

perhaps the nation itself

and, yet, it didn't always dominate the skyline quite like this.

It was George IV who had it extended upwards by 30 feet,

treating it almost like one of those wonderful sculptural candelabra in

the Grand Service - something that could be adjusted at the royal whim.

Outside, Windsor is a castle.

Inside, it's a palace.

And the whole thing is a kind of temple to British royalty -

an institution that has survived the decades of revolution

and emerged victorious from war with France.

And at the centre of the castle is a collaboration

with the portrait painter Sir Thomas Lawrence,

a contemporary of Turner and Constable,

and just as stormily romantic.

Lawrence made his sitters seem lit by flashes of lightning.

He made them beautiful, heroic.

He did this with George in his coronation portrait.

And in Windsor Castle's Waterloo Chamber,

he did the same en masse for the restored monarchies of Europe.

This is the Waterloo Chamber,

a great hall of heroes.

Whenever come in here I feel as though

a soundtrack ought to be playing,

perhaps Beethoven's 5th Symphony.

HE SINGS 5TH SYMPHONY FATE MOTIF

Up there, at the centre, holding the sword of state, we have Wellington,

the great hero, the great hero of the Battle of Waterloo,

the great hero in the British victory over France, the old enemy -

Napoleon and all that.

That's what this space was designed to celebrate.

On the left, Platov, his Russian ally.

To the right, Blucher, commanding the Prussian forces,

standing on the battlefield, smoke, lightning, storm clouds.

There's the smell of gunpowder in the air.

I think if George IV could've had smoke machines in the room,

he would have had them.

How does the space work?

Well, up there, the military heroes.

Down here, smaller portraits of leading statesman.

And, here, on the side walls,

you've got these monumental portraits

of the crowned heads of the day.

There we have the Emperor of Russia.

Over here, we've got George IV himself.

It's the monarchs, of course, rather than the generals

and the statesman who are the real stars of the show.

For this is a statement by a sometime radical

that monarchy will triumph in the end.

And it's all been done in a very British way.

The British had never liked that kind of huge, trumpeting,

self-declarative type of painting, the battle scene.

They'd always preferred the portrait

and I think George IV's brilliance, with Thomas Lawrence, his painter,

was to turn the portrait into a version of the victory painting,

to imply the victory in the setting, in the scene,

in the smoke, in the romantic ambience,

while still remaining true to the portrait mould.

For Thomas Lawrence, all this meant an arduous

series of painting campaigns.

But the biggest adventure of all took him to Rome

and resulted in the creation of THIS picture -

his masterpiece - the portrait of Pope Pius VII.

The handling of the fabrics is tremendous.

Look at the way that he's captured that watered silk.

The papal slippers.

No less a figure than Eugene Delacroix,

the leading French Romantic painter,

he looked at this picture and he said,

"Well, gone are the days when we in France

"ask if the English have any painters."

This is a masterpiece.

Lawrence is a master.

It's a diamond of a painting.

It's a really special moment.

This is a moment when British painting is set on a new footing

in Europe, and British painting actually influences

continental European painting in a way that had never happened before.

So, I think, in so many ways, you really have to see George IV

as one of the great patrons in the entire history of the royal family.

I certainly think he's...

There is no-one after Charles I

who's more significant than George IV.

After George IV died in 1830,

The Times dammed him for his decadence,

saying that he'd contributed more to the demoralisation of society

than any prince recorded in the pages of history.

But it was George who left behind the palaces, the castles,

and the objects that we most identify with the modern monarchy.

To collect great art

you need to understand how it speaks to all of us.

Is it any wonder that the king who left behind so many treasures

was also the most flawed and perhaps the most human of them all?

The monarch who would build on George's legacy

was his niece Victoria, who came to the throne in 1837.

She's usually cast as louche, old George's uptight opposite,

but she shared his passion for collecting,

while keeping within her means.

And she didn't just use art to define her reign,

she also used it to define her marriage.

The union of Victoria and Albert was an arranged marriage

which actually worked.

They were first cousins and they met just a few days

before Victoria's 17th birthday.

She fondly remembered looking at some drawings on a sofa

and feeling very much at home.

In 1839, her second meeting with Albert,

she noted how beautiful his blue eyes were,

how noble and exquisite his nose was.

She was touched by his little moustachios

and, even more so, by his tiny little whiskers.

And there they all are captured in this beautiful,

very early depiction of Albert by Victoria.

He's every inch...

..the dashing hero of romantic fantasy.

Think Byron, think Heathcliff, think Mr Darcy.

Right next to that drawing is Albert's depiction of Victoria,

rather more learned, much more deferential.

The extent which making art was part of their marriage,

their happy marriage, is exemplified by two images here -

a watercolour and a drawing.

A watercolour by Albert, drawing by Victoria.

They're side by side in the album.

They were done on the same trip, a voyage round the isle of Jersey.

Albert's rather smouldering, romantic sunset scene,

Victoria's rather precise rendering of Norman Point.

But I think what they give you between them

is this sense of Victoria and Albert together

looking at nature, looking at the world, depicting it.

They make art together

the way some married couples play Scrabble together.

For Albert, learning how to make art was the best way to understand it.

He took lessons in lithography, chalk drawing and etching.

And here we've actually got Albert's very own etching tools,

preserved almost as saint's relics here in Windsor.

And, with these tools, he and Victoria

embarked on a new adventure in art.

Namely, an adventure in etching.

And, very conveniently, they inscribed the images,

these etchings, in such a way that you know who did what.

So, here, Victoria invented the image and Albert drew and etched it.

And to give you some idea of just how many of these etchings were made

and printed, this entire album is full of them,

and this is just one of many albums, one per year,

which they filled with these images.

And it's open at a page which shows Waldman,

their characterful dachshund,

hoping, I think, hoping, hoping, hoping for his next meal.

In Victoria and Albert's marriage, art held a special place.

It was somewhere they could both meet as equals.

This is best seen at their retreat on the Isle of Wight, Osborne House,

a building that Albert, in effect, designed.

Artists came and went with ease here.

And, inside, his and Victoria's personal collections

were on display.

Items that might easily have been lost in George IV's echoey palaces.

This is the grand corridor at Osborne House

and there's no better place to really see, feel, understand

the love that both Albert and Victoria had for art.

Above all, perhaps, the art of sculpture

because this is really their private sculpture gallery.

Albert had been on the Grand Tour.

He'd visited Rome, he'd experienced the great masterpieces of antiquity

and he loved to be surrounded by classical images.

Look, inset into the walls are these little plaster casts,

based on the Elgin Marbles, all around we see heroes and heroines.

But this is more than just a collection of objects.

It's also a collection of gifts

because nearly every single sculpture in here

was presented either by Victoria to Albert,

or from Albert to Victoria.

Victoria and Albert gave gifts with great ceremony.

Birthday and Christmas tables were laid

and on them were elaborate displays of art,

garlanded with bouquets of flowers.

The whole display would then be recorded as a watercolour,

a work of art in itself.

That's quite a birthday present.

1852.

Queen Victoria gives this picture to Prince Albert

and it's hung in the room here at Osborne where,

side by side, they go about the business of running the Empire.

This is where they sit to go through the dispatch boxes every day

and that is the picture that Victoria thinks should be on the wall.

It's basically a voyeur painting,

lots and lots of female naked flesh

being spied by that man up in the corner.

But the way the painting's composed,

it actually places us in the position of the voyeur.

What is it?

A fantastically accomplished piece of high Victorian soft porn.

Victoria herself described it

as a beautiful painting of beautiful women.

And if ever a work from her collection gave the lie

to the idea that Victoria was Victorian prudish, well, this is it.

I think this painting was her way of saying to the rather buttoned-up

Albert that no matter how much work we do here,

I want you, my beloved,

to stay in touch with your sexy side.

Queen Victoria also valued art that fixed a particular moment.

You can see this at Osborne in a genre of sculpture unique to her.

Queen Victoria is probably the most famously morbid monarch

in British history, and it's often thought that she was plunged into

that morbidity by the death of Albert.

But these very poignant images show, I think, very clearly,

that she thought a lot about death long before his passing.

What are they?

They're little, marble facsimiles

of the feet, the hands, and the arms

of Victoria and Albert's infant children.

This is the foot of Princess Victoria.

This is the arm of Princess Louise.

The arm of Prince Leopold.

Despite their funereal quality, these are relics of living children,

sculpted from plaster casts taken while they were fast asleep.

I think what they tell us, what they speak to Victoria of,

is the fact that, yes, her children have grown up

but the children they once were have died.

They will never come back.

They can never be, as it were, known again except in this form.

What a wonderful way it is to remember the child

that your adult child has grown out of being.

I think these works of art, and they are works of art, conceived,

designed, created, in effect, even if she didn't technically make them,

by Queen Victoria, they were her way of expressing

the depth of her love for her children

and her attachment

to the very idea of childhood as somehow

a blessed state.

Albert, a student of art history,

designed Osborne as a Renaissance Italian palazzo.

An enormous fresco by William Dyce looms over the main staircase,

a relic of the Prince's attempt to revive fresco painting

and introduce it to Britain.

His dressing room was filled

with dozens of early Italian masterpieces,

including this triptych by Duccio, the father of Sienese painting.

In the 1840s, this was collecting at its most avant-garde.

Albert was certainly didactic.

The royal children were expected to grow their own vegetables,

learn soldiery in a mock-fort and also, of course, to collect.

What have we here? Well...

..this is one of my favourite things in all of Osborne House.

It's Prince Albert's little museum.

I say museum but what it really is, I think, is a Wunderkammer,

a room of wonders,

a cabinet of curiosities because it contains examples

of more or less everything under the Sun.

So, for example, in this cabinet, we've got the Far East.

Trophies of Empire.

We've got a peacock feather confiscated from the governor

of one of the Chinese states during one of the Opium Wars.

And, above, this wonderfully totemic,

tribal image of Queen Victoria.

There are, of course, remnants of the culture of the ancient world,

and, down here, I notice...

..part of the ceiling of the Necropolis in Athens.

Sh! Don't tell the Greeks, they might want it back.

As well as archaeology, there's natural history,

geology and world culture.

The traditional dress of two orphans from the Crimean War

who came to Osborne after being rescued by the Royal Navy.

There's a dazzling breadth of interest here

and a sense that anything might be worth collecting.

I love this.

Made in South America,

it's a feathered hat presented to Queen Victoria.

Now, I like to think that that was her gardening hat.

I can't prove it and there are no photographs

but I'm sure she would have worn it.

And, at the end of the room, you've got this fantastic, spooky

apparition of an entire stuffed crocodile.

But what's wonderful about this little family museum

is the sense that you have, as you read the labels,

every one of his children added something to it.

This was added by Beatrice, this was added by Louise,

this was added by Edward, the future Edward VII.

What you realise in here is that Albert didn't just give his children

a love of art, and curiosity, and so on,

he actually gave them nothing less than a kind of mania

for collecting and curating.

Albert's careful curatorial mind was handy

given the strict budget that he and Victoria set themselves.

For paintings, Victoria allowed herself £2,000 a year.

To spread royal patronage around, she and Albert often purchased

a single, representative painting by an artist.

John Martin's hymn to the British landscape

as it was about to disappear under railway lines.

William Powell Frith's portrait of Victorian society

on manoeuvres, thanks to those same railways.

Albert spent a great deal of energy reordering and cataloguing

the Royal Collection.

And, at Windsor Castle, he created this beautifully decorated space

as his own inner sanctum.

So, the Print Room at Windsor Castle...

..Albert's brainchild, and there he is, in profile,

and this beautiful ceiling as well.

Tell me a little bit about the room.

Well, the room was configured by Albert in the 1850s,

completed just before his death.

And it was essentially to his design

in the manner of a Renaissance studiolo

with beautiful plaster, painted ceiling,

carved cabinets all the way around.

And this was to house the prints and drawings collection.

And do you feel this is THE space, among all others,

that takes us to the heart of Albert?

Yes. The Raphael collection was the heart of his activity.

And this is the Raphael cabinet and, as you can see,

it contains 50 portfolios of prints and photographs

after the works of Raphael.

So, this is a kind of database?

Yes. And, to this day, it's unsurpassed.

This is the most comprehensive assemblage

of the works of Raphael in existence.

-Wow.

-If I can just lift this rather heavy portfolio up onto the table.

So, he was a weightlifter as well as an art historian.

Well, they had porters in those days.

And the portfolio that we have here is of the Stanza della Segnatura,

the ceiling only.

The coverage was so great he could have an entire portfolio

devoted to the ceiling of one room.

So, in the Vatican, can't collect it, can't own it,

but you can own it, as it were, in photographic form

-or in reproduction form.

-Exactly.

And photographs are where the Raphael collection is revolutionary

because it's right at the dawn of photography.

So, he actually got somebody to go into the Vatican

and to go into the Stanza della Segnatura, in the Pope's Apartments,

-and to take photographs?

-Yes.

-Of these pictures.

What sort of cameras were they using?

Well, that's the size of the negative. That's a contact print.

That's the size of the negative? Man!

I'm just awestruck by the Victorians.

But, of course, what it lacked was colour

and that was provided through these chromolithographs.

So, now we've got, in effect, a handmade colour photograph.

And what's the point of it all?

Who's this for?

What's Albert trying to achieve?

It's not just for his own pleasure because he's not like that.

This was never intended to be the finished product.

This was a tool for students to use for generations afterwards.

And Albert hoped that people would come to Windsor and would use

the Raphael collection,

and this would be a springboard for the systematic,

for the scientific study of Raphael's works.

Which is exactly how I was taught art history,

-in a photographic library.

-Yes.

So, this is everything you need to try to understand

-how she came into being?

-Yes.

When one thinks of royal families, kings and queens,

you often think of them instinctively as people

who wanted to keep their treasures for themselves, and only their

courtiers and themselves would ever see these things.

But Albert and Victoria seem to me, they're completely the opposite.

They move in the opposite direction.

They want to take knowledge and art and science,

they want to take it and give it to the public.

This interest in the processes of mass reproduction

is typical of Albert.

He didn't just want to disseminate knowledge,

he believed that modern industry could finally put great works of art

into the hands of the masses.

In 1843, Prince Albert arrived with much fanfare here in Birmingham.

He wanted to witness at first hand some of the new,

cutting-edge manufacturing technology.

There was great local interest.

The Birmingham Gazette reported that the Prince was especially interested

in the operation of batteries in connection

with various metals in solution.

He saw a real rose turned into a golden rose

and he was so fascinated by the process

that he became positively obsessed by it.

Albert witnessed a process called electroforming,

which is being recreated for me by artist Jo Horton.

A dried rose has been coated in an electrically conductive material

and attached to a battery.

A solution containing a precious metal is being prepared.

Gold in Albert's demonstration, copper in mine.

So, Igor, the creature lives.

SHE LAUGHS

I feel as if I'm transported back into some strange world

-of 19th-century science.

-Yeah, absolutely.

I'm sort of really inspired, as an artist, by Mary Shelley

and all that sort of era.

It's sort of what's drawn me to the whole process itself.

-Great. Well, I'm.... Dip away.

-Absolutely.

So, we're going in...

And this will be kept in position to get a first coating.

The conductive material on the rose attracts copper from the solution,

gradually encasing the flower and stem.

So, what's actually happening?

Well, the copper deposition is thickening

and it's also travelling down and growing around the rosebud.

So in about 40 minutes, it should be fully bright.

We shouldn't have to do any sort of finishing.

It's a really sort of economical, exciting sort of process.

I think they actually called the technicians the alchemists.

-Is that right?

-Yes, I think they were described as that.

-Great, well, let's have a look.

-OK.

-I'll let you take it out.

SOLUTION BUBBLES

There we go.

-So...

-It's a delicate little thing to be turning.

-Oh, wow.

-It is.

-That's really good, isn't it? Fantastic.

It really is. It's just so magical.

For Albert, electroforming wasn't about gilding flowers.

Anything could be copied.

It was a way to reproduce the artworks of classical

and Renaissance civilisation.

Reproductions of archaeological finds from Pompeii and Herculaneum

were copied and made, collected by bourgeois consumers

as well as Victoria and Albert themselves.

And Albert commissioned an exquisite jewel cabinet for Victoria,

replete with electroformed figures to show the new

could sit alongside the antique.

It was placed prominently in the Great Exhibition of 1851.

Albert was the prime mover in this first, great international showcase.

An optimistic attempt to understand the new machine age preserved for

Victoria and Albert in a souvenir album filled with watercolours

by Joseph Nash and Louis Haghe.

But, for me, Albert's most enduring legacy was created after

the Great Exhibition, and you can see this on the streets

of South Kensington in London.

For my money, for anyone's money,

this is one of the most telling monuments of Victorian Britain.

At the top, Albert.

On the side, the financial accounts, the score.

The Great Exhibition cost £336,000.

The revenues, £522,000.

Translate that into modern money,

50 million spent, 80 million back.

And what did Albert do with the profit?

The profit from his great scheme...

..he bought this!

He bought this. He bought South Ken!

And he stipulated that here should be placed great museums of art,

science, industry.

And it came to pass.

No wonder that, even in his own lifetime, this whole area

became known as Albertopolis.

What a man, what a visionary!

South Kensington is the embodiment of Albert's enlightened,

Germanic belief that culture and learning

should be at the very heart of a nation.

One of the earliest institutions to open here

was the South Kensington Museum in 1857.

Most people know it today as the V&A.

Museums change lives and this museum certainly changed mine.

It was the first place my mum brought me to when I was little boy

to look at and to enjoy art, and I doubt very much whether I'd be doing

what I do now if it weren't for the V&A.

And I'm sure my story has been repeated thousands of times.

How many photographers have come here to deepen their understanding

of their craft? How many designers have come here to beg,

borrow or steal an idea?

How many artists have come here to seek inspiration?

I think Albert was the very first member of the royal family

profoundly to realise that by taking art out to the people

of Great Britain, art could be used to improve the life of the nation.

And we call it the Victorian Age,

but surely it should also be remembered as the age of Albert.

We all know how this ended.

The energetic Albert died on December 14 1861...

..aged only 42.

The impact on Victoria was profound.

For three months after Albert's death

Victoria couldn't bear to come in here to his sanctum, the Print Room.

And, then, on the 20th of March 1862

she writes this very stoical entry in her diary.

She says she's brought herself to go to the Print Room,

"the favourite resort of my dearest Albert."

And then she simply adds,

"I was much upset and could say nothing."

They still keep, in this room...

..these four albums of drawings and watercolours,

all of them made by Victoria in the five or six years

immediately after Albert's death.

Each year is prefaced with one of these little inscriptions.

A black cross,

"The fourth year of my great sorrow."

What of the images themselves? Well...

..it's a sad contrast with the earlier albums, where so often,

you can sense the couple's pleasure in pasting Victoria's image

this side, Albert's image that side.

There's none of this here because,

of course, all the images are by Victoria.

I wouldn't psychoanalyse the watercolours to the extent

of seeing them as artistic expressions of some deep, deep, deep

depression, although perhaps there is an element of that.

I think they're also actually very helpful to Victoria.

I think her love of art that she'd cultivated with Albert gave her

an ability to get outside of herself, literally,

to see something outside herself and transmit it to paper.

And I think that probably had

a considerable therapeutic function for her.

But, occasionally, you can sense that some of the images

descend to a darker place.

This one in particular.

A small but singularly eerie and rather bleak watercolour

which she's written,

"View from my window at Balmoral...

"..by moonlight."

So, you can sense a bit of insomnia, a bit of unrest,

a bit of disturbance.

And on the very next page there is an image of Albert's mausoleum

so we know the way in which her thoughts were turning.

But away from Victoria's private grief

something else had been snuffed out.

She would continue to collect but never with the flair and ambition

she had displayed during her marriage.

As a result, I think Albert's death marked the last moment

when the Court influenced the wider culture of the nation

as it had in the days of Charles I and George III.

Take the period from the French Revolution to 1861, when Albert died.

It really was a golden age of royal patronage and collecting.

Think of George IV's immense appetite for art, architecture,

the decorative arts, tableware, you name it.

Think of Albert's astonishing energy, his spreading the word.

His proselytising, his working with Victoria.

But the truth is that, after Albert's death,

things would never quite be the same again.

This golden moment had passed.

In the final episode, the Royal Collection enters modern times.

As the monarchy adapts to the end of Empire and a world at war,

I explore how the character of its collecting changed...

..entering a smaller, more intimate realm.