Modern Times Art, Passion & Power: The Story of the Royal Collection

If you want to see something truly breathtaking...

..come in closer. This is the Mosaic Egg.

A Faberge Egg,

one of the most remarkable,

one of the most precious objects in the entire Royal Collection.

A lace-like structure of astonishing delicacy.

Sapphires, diamonds, seed pearls.

An extraordinary thing.

This egg was made in 1914, at a time when the British Royal family was

exchanging Faberge's confections with their cousins,

the Russian imperial dynasty.

But while the British monarchy has flourished,

the reign and life of Tsar Nicholas II was brutally cut short.

He, and his family, executed in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution.

So this egg is a cautionary object.

An egg is a fragile thing.

So, too, is a monarchy in the 20th century.

And monarchs only survive if they adapt and change.

In this final episode of the series,

I'm exploring the last century-and-a-half of the Royal Collection,

when women took charge.

From Victoria to Elizabeth II,

these queens and queen consorts have used art to steer the monarchy

through times of crisis and turbulent change.

Here's how they navigated the age of empire...

..and the advent of mass reproduction.

She is definitely trying to control how people perceive her.

Through their collecting, they've expressed solidarity with a broken nation.

And displayed defiance under threat.

The overwhelming impression, for me, is one of foreboding.

The stormy mentality of siege.

In modern times, the Royal Collection survived a calamitous fire and risen

from the ashes as palace doors have opened to more people

than ever before.

And it's still growing, still being added to.

I have the sense that you very much like a project, sir.

I do, rather. Oh, yes.

Very important.

And I do think that if you trace the development of the Royal Collection

during that 100 years and more,

what you see very clearly is the determined emergence

of a modern monarchy.

I've spent a year exploring the Royal Collection.

Over a million works of art and decorative objects owned by the Queen

in her official role as monarch.

The cream of the collection's mostly on display,

on the walls and ceilings of some of Britain's most-visited palaces.

But away from the public gaze there are lesser-known works.

In St James's Palace there are paintings by household names in

Queen Victoria's time,

who've since fallen out of fashion.

And then there are reminders of things that we'd rather forget.

Now, right from the start of Queen Victoria's reign,

the objects and the images that came into the Royal Collection reflected

the extraordinary growth of British influence overseas.

Above all, empire in India.

It wasn't always a pretty story.

CLASH AND TUMULT OF BATTLE

This billboard-sized canvas by the artist Edward Armitage isn't just

one of Victoria's larger purchases.

It's also possibly her most bloodcurdling.

A depiction of the 1843 Battle of Meeanee when British troops seized

the province of Sindh in what is now Pakistan.

Now, British forces were outnumbered ten to one but their victory was a

foregone conclusion.

They had vastly superior organisation and weaponry.

The armies of the Amirs of Sindh lost 6,000 men.

British casualties were fewer than 300 dead and wounded.

It wasn't so much a battle, as a massacre.

Thackeray, the novelist, author of Vanity Fair, detested this picture.

He thought it was immoral, an encouragement to murder.

He particularly detested that figure.

The phlegmatic infantryman...

..doing away with his enemy, grinding his bayonet into his body.

Thackeray thought it looks as though he's trying to torture him at the

moment of killing him. And he was even more appalled when

the man next to him, looking up at the picture, approvingly said,

"He's giving him his gruel."

So why did Victoria buy this work?

I suspect it's to do with the way a rather shabby battle's been presented,

as an epic struggle to be remembered down the ages.

The Sindhi fighters, noble defenders of a tragically lost cause.

Well, I think that's what Victoria loved about the painting.

She liked the way that Armitage had

elevated a real event and made it feel like

part of history with a capital H.

Destiny with a capital D.

She liked to feel that she was both a witness to and a participant in...

..the great forward march of history,

the great forward march of the British Empire.

British India would play a great part in Victoria's own destiny.

In the later 19th century, a political project was put in place to bind the

people of India closer to their British overlords.

So, Queen Victoria and her family became the

personable faces of empire.

As part of this, a major event took place in 1875,

a royal tour of India.

Not by Victoria herself, but her eldest son,

the affable Albert Edward, Prince of Wales.

I've come to Leicester's New Walk Museum and Art Gallery to discover

more about his four-month visit.

Travelling by boat, train,

carriage and elephant to areas that Britain controlled directly

or through local rulers.

It was the custom in India to present honoured guests with

magnificent presents and for them to respond in kind.

And the Prince's inner circle feared a terrible escalation,

the sort of thing that happens at Christmas when someone's given you

something that you can't afford to match.

So, they sent out instructions - nothing too magnificent,

nothing too special, no gold, no silver, no jewellery.

Arms and armour, yes, but please, please, rein it in.

Those supposedly modest gifts are now in the Royal Collection.

I'm seeing them as they're prepared for a touring exhibition by curator

Kajal Meghani.

So, Kajal, looking at the case,

I'd have to say, I don't think that they did rein it in, did they?

Not at all. I think there's an element of trying to impress Albert Edward,

Prince of Wales. But also,

it is this traditional aspect of Indian diplomacy.

This is an incredible dagger that was presented by the Maharajah of Alwar,

Mangal Singh.

And the blade has a channel that's been drilled into it,

which has been filled with loose pearls that move

as you tilt the dagger.

You'd want to be careful with that, it's pretty sharp, isn't it?

Yes. All these weapons were designed to be functional

but also very, very beautiful.

Well, maybe we should look at something a little bit less lethal.

Yes.

Oh, this is an interesting case.

I love these things.

So, they're late-18th-century brass military figures that were

commissioned by the Raja of Pithapuram.

And the legend attached to these figures were that he should review

his troops daily.

So they're individually modelled and they represent all the sort of

different members that would be within his army.

Ah! So he couldn't actually inspect his whole army

every day but he had a sort of chess set made of his army, out of bronze.

-Exactly.

-So he's got soldiers on elephants,

he's got a wonderful African mercenary armed with a blunderbuss.

The gifts that were presented, they represent a snapshot of time, place,

also the different types of craftsmanship that were being

practised on the subcontinent during this period.

HE CHUCKLES

I'm smiling because Kajal's been very, very kind.

I asked, not thinking that you would be able to,

asked if we could actually have this out of the case.

And you agreed and here it is.

What a fantastic thing!

This is one of the star objects of our exhibition

because the level of craftsmanship is astounding.

You're not kidding.

I think this is one of your favourites, too.

-This is one of my favourites.

-Yeah.

-It's an inkwell.

-It is.

It's got a pen, that's the mast here.

Oh, wow.

And if you look closely, there's an inscription or a dedication to

the Prince of Wales, in English, from the Maharajah of Benares.

So, the Maharajah of Benares on the Ganges?

Yes, he's the donor of this gift,

so the Prince actually travelled down the River Ganges

on a similar barge in January 1876.

How fantastic.

The deck comes off to reveal two inkwells.

All enamelled, as well.

Enamelled. Got a pair of scissors and a penknife, too.

Oh! It's just wonderful.

You sort of wonder if it would float.

-I'm not suggesting...

-Don't do that!

-No, no!

Pen-boat diplomacy, you might say.

The Prince's visit was hailed as a great success and soon after,

Victoria was made Empress of India.

The proclamation, the first Delhi Durbar,

took place on the 1st of January 1877.

An enormous piece of theatre as well as a cynical bit of empire politics.

-But the thing about Victoria is that

-she

-was never cynical.

The woman who'd purchased bloody paintings of conquest really would

take her new role to heart.

For the rest of her life, India would be

a place of fascination for Victoria.

And while she never visited India herself,

she did encounter its people and its culture through art.

India's Empress held court at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight,

gamely taking lessons in Hindustani from her Indian attendants.

And in a new wing, the Durbar Room, a plaster and papier-mache fantasy,

this was Victoria's own personal portal to the subcontinent -

India-on-sea.

And in an adjacent corridor, one of her most surprising commissions,

from the Austrian artist Rudolf Swoboda.

She asks Swoboda to spend all of two years in the subcontinent,

painting a representative cross-section of the population.

And he painted, one by one, Indians who struck his attention,

whom he found interesting.

He tried not to choose them for wealth or high status or low status.

He tried to be very, very even-handed.

And they're painted with tremendous brio and panache.

That gentleman up there,

the man with the white turban and the exploding star-shaped beard.

He was probably painted in about 40 minutes,

so you have this wonderful immediacy.

A kind of slowed-down version of photographic immediacy.

And what's really striking and

unusual about them from a 19th-century perspective

is that there is very, very little sense of that rather

repulsive imperialist set of preconceptions about people,

that people are specimens, if you like.

There's none of that here. No.

These people, exotic though they may have seemed to 19th-century

Englishmen, are depicted and respected, I think,

by the artist, as human beings.

They simply say, well, here they are.

It seems to me there was quite a step change in Victoria's thinking.

Becoming more outward-looking,

choosing to spend the winter of her days surrounded by these faces.

I have to say, I think there's something rather cheering about her

capacity for change.

But Victoria's eyes weren't just on India.

She wanted to be Empress of Europe, as well.

Over the years, she'd manoeuvred her children and grandchildren into a

series of strategic marriages with the other great royal houses.

In Windsor Castle's grand corridor there's a painting by Laurits Tuxen,

of what Victoria called her "royal mob."

Pictures can be time machines.

This one certainly is.

It's 1887, it's Windsor Castle, and it's Queen Victoria's Jubilee.

Victoria sits in the centre of the scene...

..surrounded by her children and by her larger family.

For although these are, in effect, the assembled crowned heads of Europe,

everyone in the room is related to

her either by descent or by marriage.

The artist casts a rosy glow over it all.

A candelabra glimmers in an antechamber beyond.

Two ladies playing the piano.

But look more closely

and you soon begin to hear false notes.

This is Princess Alexandra, a Dane. She faces her husband,

the future Edward VII, but look how far away she is from him,

Frederick, Crown Prince of Prussia.

She insisted to the artist that she

would not be painted anywhere near him

because of the traumatic events of 1864.

The war between Prussia and Denmark, during which,

in the space of just a few hours,

the Prussian armies decimated an entire young generation of Danes,

and condemned her nation to defeat.

And there are portents of what's to come.

Look, in this corner,

that's the man we now know as the Kaiser.

Wilhelm II,

who would take Germany into the First World War.

So, yes,

it's a family celebration, but it's

also a picture of just how dangerous,

just how volatile, just how explosive the world was

as it entered the 20th century.

Of this next generation,

I think it was the glamorous Danish Princess of Wales, Alexandra,

who did most to bring the monarchy into the modern age.

The best place to encounter her is at the top of a very steep set of

stairs in Windsor's Round Tower.

Now, here's the thing. Up there you'll find the royal archives.

Thousands upon thousands of documents.

But it's also where they keep all of the photographs in the

Royal Collection, one of the world's greatest collections of photography.

450,000 images.

So, let's go and have a look.

Onward and upward!

The photographic collection was founded by Victoria and Albert.

But in the later 19th century, photography belonged to the young.

And Alexandra, in particular, understood how royalty could use this new form

of image-making to its own advantage.

Royal Collection Trust's Sophie Gordon is showing me how Alexandra

embraced the medium in front of the lens and behind it.

These portraits, which show the Princess of Wales in 1867...

Gosh, she looks like a Pre-Raphaelite lady with her long hair.

Yes, it's the long hair that makes this a really unusual portrait.

It was taken during her recovery from an illness that she had around

the time of the birth of her third child, Princess Louise.

And there was a lot of public concern about her health.

And so these photographs were issued to show that she was on the way to

-good health.

-I'm not an expert but even I know about this one.

Because this is such a famous image.

It was one of the most famous photographs in the 19th century.

It shows Princess Alexandra with her child, Princess Louise, on her back.

On her back, but not in the arms of the governess.

It's remarkably relaxed, isn't it?

-Yeah.

-It's just showing someone who's playful,

who's in touch with her emotions, who wants to play with her child.

It's completely unprecedented, really,

in how a member of the Royal family is being presented here.

So, she is definitely trying to control how people perceive her.

Alexandra was quirkily creative, arranging photographs into elaborate,

almost surrealistic collages.

Some are very Monty Python,

although you'd have to be part of her gang to get the joke.

Who, I wonder, is this spider,

trapping these poor ladies in his web?

But with the introduction of

lightweight portable cameras in the 1880s,

Alexandra became a photographer in her own right.

Oh, wow.

And you can immediately see the sort of photographs that she's producing.

There's a big emphasis in her work on contrasting light and dark and

the interplay of shadows, for example, in different textures.

And she seems to be particularly drawn to seascapes.

Yes, she's quite the romantic, isn't she?

It's quite surprising, really.

It's in keeping with a

movement that was happening in photography at

the end of the 19th century,

the Pictorialist movement,

where there is this great emphasis on contrasting light

and dark and shadow.

And it's part of a bigger move to really establish photography as an

art form in its own right.

And they're interestingly printed on matte paper.

-Yes.

-You could almost imagine that

the photographic ink has been applied

like a watercolour.

That is fantastic, isn't it?

And that speaks to me of her

commitment to be a photographer because to

take a picture like that as the

storm clouds whip in off the North Sea

and the boat begins to heave and the swell begins to rise,

you've really got to want to take a photograph.

She was clearly determined.

She's a fascinating character.

When she wasn't behind the lens,

Queen Alexandra, as she was from 1901,

was the very embodiment of turn-of- the-century elegance,

presiding over a final gilded age of European royalty that blossomed

before the First World War.

Her sister, Dagmar, had married into Russia's Romanov dynasty.

Mother of Tsar Nicholas II,

Dagmar introduced Alexandra to the work of Russian jeweller

Peter Carl Faberge,

whose confections began to be enthusiastically stockpiled by the

British Royal family.

Royal Collection Trust's Caroline De Guitaut

is showing me a few extraordinary highlights.

What a treat you've got in store for me.

How amazing.

-I've got a few treats for you to look at.

-Oh!

These are amongst the most complex of the Faberge pieces that were

produced by Carl Faberge and his craftsmen.

And that's because they incorporate so many different techniques.

You have the stone carving, which is very much a strong tradition in the

Russian decorative arts.

And so here you have what appears to be a vase full of water.

It looks as though we're looking through water.

And the stem is refracted through that water.

But actually, this is solid rock crystal.

How amazing. It's the goldsmith working in defiance of time decay.

He's made the lily of the valley last for ever.

-Exactly, yes.

-And I recognise this middle one because I go out picking

rowan berries, they make very good jelly.

Very good with a bit of beef or a bit of venison.

But that is fantastic.

I think what's so interesting about

these, they're trying so hard to be entirely naturalistic,

so you can see, if you look closely, that the berries, in certain cases,

there's a slight variation in the tone.

Some of them are dark, they're starting to shrivel,

but of course he still wants us to remember that these are made of

solid materials. This is nephrite, it's wafer-thin.

-This is stone.

-This is stone. And this is gold.

I'm going to repeat that.

This is stone. He's even understood the way in which the rowan's leaves

are shiny on the front.

-Exactly.

-But they're not shiny on the back.

-No, they're dull.

-They've got this

-slight dullness. And that must be deliberate, all deliberate.

-Oh, completely.

They're not as famous as Faberge's eggs but I think

they're every bit as special, perhaps even more miraculous.

Alexandra's passion for Faberge was contagious.

Her children and husband Edward VII were also collectors.

And the astute Faberge opened a branch in London to capitalise on

his royal clientele.

And in 1907, Faberge took an order from the King for a menagerie of

sculptures based on the animals at Sandringham.

Queen Alexandra loved the animals.

She just enjoyed their charm and their whimsical nature.

They have real personality.

Like this dormouse carved from a beautiful piece of agate.

His eyes are made of little cabochon sapphires.

He's got platinum whiskers and he's actually chewing on gold straws.

A dormouse with cabochon sapphire eyes.

Eating gold.

Platinum whiskers.

He's the king of the dormouse world.

You can see why Queen Alexandra liked these,

and she would keep them in two cabinets

entirely designed for her Faberge collection

in the drawing room at Sandringham House.

And these would be specially lit up with electric light, every evening,

so that the house guests of the King and Queen could see and admire this

-collection.

-But I suppose, in a way,

there's always a slight hint of melancholy when one looks at these

objects because they're all, really,

just before, or a lot of them, just before the First World War.

The peace before the fall.

Yes. It's a last sort of great flowering of this sort of slightly

frivolous tradition.

Neither the Russian Imperial family nor the Faberge firm would survive

the wars and revolutions now hurtling over the horizon.

One reason that the British monarchy endured is that under the new King,

Alexandra's son, George V, they dramatically changed course.

During the First World War, the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha

dynasty changed their name

to the almost suburban-sounding House of Windsor.

From now on, the British monarchy would be practical,

down-to-earth, on hand to help.

Much of this transformation can be traced to George V's wife,

the indomitable Queen Mary.

Within days of war being declared, Mary was commandeering thousands of

volunteers from her needlework guild to create socks,

belts and shirts for the troops.

And here in St James's Palace,

the vast state apartments were commandeered as a depot for poor relief.

And then there were the hospital visits during which Mary, in particular,

insisted on spending time with the most-injured soldiers.

The normally phlegmatic George admitted that he found the whole

experience deeply distressing but duty had to be done.

One of the great treasures of the modern Royal Collection was made in

part to thank the Queen for this service and steadfastness during the Great War.

A new royal resident for a new age.

Such was the affection for Queen Mary

that when Princess Marie-Louise,

her childhood friend, suggested that as a gesture of thanks,

a great doll's house should be

created and presented as a gift to Mary,

the response was overwhelming.

More than 1,000 people, something like 1,500 different people,

and companies, collaborated to create the interior.

Door-makers, marble cutters, painters, writers.

Architect Sir Edwin Lutyens created a miniature royal townhouse

complete in every detail.

As a result, it's almost a three-dimensional archive of British

craftsmanship in the 1920s.

Everything in it might be small but it's as real as it possibly can be.

So, for example, the shotguns.

Even though they're only that long, they could be broken,

loaded and fired.

There's real champagne in those champagne bottles.

And the library is really something special.

Just look at the desks.

You've got miniature,

perfectly readable copies of the newspapers.

But the books themselves are the real wonder of this library because

each one is a proper miniature book.

And lots of them were created specially by the leading authors of the day.

So, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a new Sherlock Holmes story.

It really is something absolutely fantastic.

Queen Elizabeth over the central fireplace.

Henry VIII, lurking in the wings.

So what significance should we find in this extraordinary object?

What does it symbolise? What does it mean?

Well, I think the easy answer is to say that it's the perfect emblem of

the modern monarchy, so reduced in its powers,

so reduced in its ambitions.

After all, once upon a time,

great palaces were brought into being to serve the monarch.

Great paintings by van Dyck or by Holbein,

were created to glorify king or queen.

Now...

..it's just a doll's house,

and the paintings it contains the size of postage stamps.

Everything shrunk to the scale of Lilliput.

But this doll's house is also the perfect emblem for Mary herself.

She was a queen who delighted in the miniature.

She adored little things, and she liked having a lot of them.

Born into minor European royalty,

she attributed her love of art to her father, the Duke of Teck.

He'd been on the edge of bankruptcy and had never been able to collect.

His daughter, once she was queen, could,

and she earned a reputation as a royal magpie,

swooping in and snaffling up

bargains around the antique shops of Mayfair.

She makes a cameo appearance in Mrs Dalloway,

Virginia Woolf's novel of London in the 1920s.

A car containing a person of very great importance is seen drawing up

to a shop.

"Yet rumours were at once in circulation from the middle of Bond Street to

"Oxford Street, passing invisibly, inaudibly, like a cloud.

"Was it the Queen in there?

"The Queen going shopping?"

In keeping with the monarchy's new sober image,

Queen Mary's tastes were discreet, neat and sweet,

and her acquisitions are sprinkled around the royal palaces like

sugar crystals.

She was fascinated with intricate craftsmanship and became a

self-taught expert on Asian decorative arts.

A cabinet in a tucked-away anteroom at Buckingham Palace is filled with

her collection of jade.

And just look at this nephrite brush rest, carved like a canal bridge.

She had ancestors in the British Royal family and sometimes bought things

they'd once owned.

Mary, Queen of Scots's pomander, a Tudor air freshener.

Or a Maundy purse of Queen Anne's.

The best place to see Mary's collection is Frogmore House.

A mile from Windsor Castle,

Frogmore has been in royal hands for three centuries.

Some of the rooms are still filled with Mary's collections and are being

studied by Royal Collection Trust's Kathryn Jones.

So this is very much Queen Mary's collection,

and this is where she kept it most privately,

so it's very much in her style.

You can see this room, actually, is amazing.

It glories in the name of the Black Museum, and you can see why.

She's gathered together all her particular interests in lacquer and

papier-mache and brought it all together in one place,

-and that's very much Queen Mary's style, putting like with like.

-Yeah.

And I think, particularly, objects that have a royal connotation,

particularly to do with royal history.

She is very keen to fill in any gaps that might be missing.

For example, this object here,

which has a lovely view of old Balmoral before Prince Albert

redesigned it, I'm sure...part of the reason she wanted to acquire it was because

it had that depiction on it.

Oh, I see, "We can never revisit old Balmoral, because Albert changed it,

-"but we can, in the form of looking at this box."

-Exactly.

Do you think there's an element of making up for her childhood, you know,

as the daughter of a rather

down-on-his-luck aristocrat, she's been moved around a lot,

almost never able

to feel that she was at home, or to collect things around herself?

Do you think there's an element of sort of almost psychological

-compensation about this?

-Yeah, absolutely, definitely.

I think that she is very keen to list every single object that comes

into her collection, and she also leaves notes with everything,

and I can show you quite a good example of...

So she doesn't want just to have it, she wants to know that she's got it,

-and she wants to know where it is.

-And where it's come from.

And this is in her own handwriting, you can see she's labelled it,

"For the Frogmore collection," where it's come from, even the date,

so that in future, people will know exactly what this object is.

And she's written on the back of the Windsor Castle note card,

"Old Balmoral Castle."

Exactly, although it may seem difficult to believe,

there is actually an element of thrift to her acquisitions.

She buys a lot at auction,

and we know from her correspondence that when it goes above a certain

price, she will drop out and not acquire it,

and you can sense her disappointment sometimes when she's lost a lot that

she was very keen to acquire.

But she knows that she's on a budget and she's not going to exceed that.

My own view is that it's conspicuously modest consumption.

Yes. And she called herself and George V...

.."Darby and Joan". I mean, that sort of classic domestic monarchy,

as it were. So I think, you know,

that very much sums up what she's trying to do.

George V didn't share his wife's passion for art.

But at the very end of his reign,

he made a dramatic intervention that would have far-reaching consequences

for the Royal Collection.

Its 7,000 paintings were in dire need of some TLC.

So a request went out to Kenneth Clark,

the wunderkind director of the National Gallery,

to take a second job as Surveyor of the King's Pictures.

When Clark turned the post down, George V angrily confronted him.

"Why won't you take the job?"

"Because, sir, I don't think I'll have the time to do it."

"Why not?!" "Well, sir, the pictures -

"the pictures will need attention."

"Nothing wrong with the pictures!

What else?"

"Public letters, people want information about the paintings.

"I'll have to reply to them." "Don't answer them!"

Now, whether Clark entirely believed the King about the condition of the

pictures and whether he entirely felt it appropriate not to answer letters

from the public, this was still the kind of offer you can't refuse.

He took the job.

Contrary to what the King had said,

Clark wrote that the collection had been "very much let down" in the

last 100 years and initiated a comprehensive programme

of cleaning and conservation.

He was just getting going when George VI came to the throne in 1936.

The new queen consort was Queen Elizabeth,

remembered latterly as the Queen Mother.

Clark encouraged her interest in art,

helping to turn her into the most daring royal collector

of the 20th century.

When you visit her home, Clarence House,

you can see that Queen Elizabeth was quietly radical in her tastes,

building up a rather surprising collection of contemporary British art.

Over here, we've got her first serious acquisition,

a picture called When Homer Nods by Augustus John.

I think it's a bit of a tease. It's actually a portrait of George Bernard Shaw,

who was hardly Homer.

And I think the point was that George Bernard Shaw talked so much,

you could only get a portrait of him when he fell asleep,

and that's what Augustus John has done.

He's waited for him to nod off.

Below, you've got Duncan Grant, a member of the Bloomsbury Group.

On this side, a small landscape by Lowry, painted in the mid-1940s.

And above, a very daring acquisition,

an extremely informal portrait of her father-in-law, George V,

with his racing manager, painted by, for me,

the greatest British artist of the first half of the 20th century -

Walter Richard Sickert.

It's one of the pictures that he painted later in life, based on

press photographs. Extremely avant-garde, very informal.

Over the mantelpiece,

another painting by Sickert,

and it shows two characters at a

fancy dress ball.

It was almost certainly painted on

the basis of an illustration in a

magazine. This is Sickert pushing almost towards Andy Warhol.

It's only in relatively recent years that Sickert's later pictures have come

into critical favour and changed hands for a lot of money,

so she was really ahead of her time in buying that work of art.

In fact, such was her interest in

cutting-edge British art that it caught

the public imagination. The Times ran a leader saying,

"The Queen has decided that contemporary British art matters."

George VI's reign is defined by the Second World War,

and those traumatic years are

writ large in the works the Queen collected.

The Landscape Of The Vernal Equinox by Paul Nash, of 1943 -

an avant-garde vision of what Britain was fighting for.

Buckingham Palace was bombed in September 1940.

Queen Elizabeth was defiant.

"Now I can look the East End in the face," she said.

After that, the family would overnight at Windsor Castle,

returning to London during the day.

But Windsor itself was under threat.

In fact, in November 1940,

night-watchers on the battlements here saw a stream of German planes

passing overhead.

The castle was under threat.

There was a real danger it might be damaged or destroyed.

The Queen decided that she would preserve the castle for ever - on paper.

She commissioned the artist John Piper to record "Fortress Windsor"

at its darkest hour.

In September 1941,

Piper was let in and given freedom to roam wherever he wanted.

Pretty soon, he began ascending towers.

He was after vantage points, views.

And it was quite a daredevil task, as the winter was coming in,

but even five inches of January snow didn't put him off.

Now, one of the first places he came to was here,

the roof of medieval St George's Chapel,

and this was the view that he chose to paint the great Round Tower of

the castle, framed by a perspective of Gothic turrets and medieval roof.

This is the most ambitious royal commission of the 20th century.

The Queen Mother hung the entire set of 26 images at Clarence House,

where they still possess a mesmerising power.

The overwhelming impression, for me, is one of foreboding -

a palpable sense of threat.

Yes, Piper has captured the monumentality of Windsor Castle,

but he's hardly depicted it as a citadel that can never be stormed.

You can feel his anxiety trembling in the air.

And look at the way he's depicted the castle,

as a series of depopulated precincts.

There's hardly a figure to be seen in these images.

It's almost as if a little bit of surrealism has worked its way into

his blood.

My favourite remark - I think it was tongue-in-cheek -

was made by George VI himself, who said, "Gosh,

"you've had terribly bad luck with the weather, haven't you, dear chap?"

Of course, he knew perfectly well the trouble wasn't with the real

weather, but the weather of the national psyche -

the stormy mentality of siege.

George VI and Elizabeth had seen the nation through the war,

but it was their daughter, Queen Elizabeth II,

who'd see Britain through the peace.

She was destined to be the most photographed woman in the world,

and the first photographer to capture her as queen was a woman,

society portraitist Dorothy Wilding.

In 59 images, using high-key lighting and a plain background,

Wilding invented a new look for a new queen,

perfectly poised between glamour and modesty.

Handwritten comments on the proofs

tell us where these images were going -

embassies, banknotes and stamps.

Wilding's stamps, miniatures for a new Elizabethan age,

were in circulation till the 1970s.

Elizabeth II inherited a collection that was still looked on as a

private royal domain.

In 1962, this began to change, with the opening of the Queen's Gallery.

Placed at the side of Buckingham Palace,

the gallery was the brainchild of Prince Philip.

Expanded in the 21st century,

it's now a chance for anyone to see the collection's masterpieces

up close - as art, not palace decor.

In this space, in this wonderful suite of galleries, you can,

pretty much any day of the year, come and see a wonderful,

permanently rotating series of exhibitions.

At the moment, it's Canaletto. Next month, it might be Rubens.

Next year, it might be Leonardo da Vinci's drawings.

In fact, I would say that the opening of the Queen's Gallery in 1962

really marked a profound shift in orientation from

the Royal Collection, and ever since that time, its face has turned more

and more and more towards the general public.

I think that's been the direction of travel during Elizabeth II's reign.

Out in the main palaces, the focus was on displaying the royal treasures.

The public areas of Hampton Court and Windsor Castle

were comprehensively rearranged.

This was an era that was conservative in the literal sense,

securing the existing collection.

The days when royalty splashed out on big statement works of art

were long gone.

For her measured purchases,

the Queen often depended on the advice of her surveyors,

who steered her toward works with a link to the monarchy.

Blanchet's portrait of the Young Pretender.

This oil sketch by van Dyck, for one of the collection's treasures.

But it was the Queen herself who made the final decision,

as with the revival of a rather wonderful portrait series of people

who've made outstanding contributions to public life.

With Royal Collection Trust's Rosie Razzall,

I'm meeting members of the prestigious Order of Merit.

The tradition of commissioning portraits of members of the Order of Merit

fell into abeyance with the outbreak of the First World War,

but it was revived again in 1987, revived by the Queen,

and the tradition has continued ever since.

That's fantastic. The Queen herself wanted to revive having them

-portrayed.

-Yes, absolutely,

and each of the portraits will be approved by the Queen personally.

I'll tell you what it makes me think of, the National Portrait Gallery.

It's almost as if there is another National Portrait Gallery now,

but it's within the Royal Collection,

and it's just of this very select group of individuals.

The Graham Greene is a really good portrait, isn't it?

-Yeah, it's full of character.

-I think he's just had his lunch, he's a little bit drunk,

and he's not in a very good mood, he doesn't want to sit for Humphrey Ocean,

but that is all very Graham Greene, isn't it?

-This is just pencil, is it?

-It's just pencil.

-A bit of smudging going on.

Yeah. He has erased some areas.

That ear is really good, as well - that's a right specimen!

It's a series that continues into the present.

David Hockney submitted his own

self-portrait, made with an iPad.

And here's Ben Sullivan's even more

recent depiction of the engineer Ann Dowling.

It's like a scientific drawing.

It's very precise and almost photographic.

You almost can imagine a bell jar being placed over her,

and she'd be left there for ever as an exhibit.

Elizabeth II's stewardship of the Royal Collection might well have

carried on at its steady pace.

But when disaster struck Windsor Castle in the early 1990s,

everything changed.

In 1992, this space was the Queen's private chapel.

On this wall, its altar,

framed by two very high floor-to-ceiling curtains.

Now, unknown to anybody,

a spotlight had been placed fractionally too close to one of

those curtains, and over the months, it had dried the material to the point where

it had become like tinder.

Then, on the morning of the 20th of November, 11.15am,

a group of conservators were here

looking after some pictures that had been temporarily stored in the room,

when they smelt burning.

They investigated, could find nothing,

but within two minutes they saw flames from the top of that curtain.

They ran to get help, but by the time the fire crews arrived,

the building was already ablaze.

For 15 hours, more than 200 firefighters fought the flames.

A rescue operation began immediately.

By an astonishing stroke of luck,

most of the objects from the burned rooms were already in store

because of restoration work,

and very little from the Royal Collection was actually lost.

But significant parts of the historic fabric of the castle were destroyed.

Restoration isn't cheap.

In fact, it cost £37 million.

Debate raged. Who was going to pay?

The Queen agreed that there would be no additional cost to the taxpayer.

So with the castle under repair,

Buckingham Palace was opened during the summer for the first time, to raise money.

But this additional cash didn't just go to repairing Windsor.

From 1993,

income from visitor admissions went to a new charitable trust

tasked with looking after the collection.

Its director is Jonathan Marsden.

The creation of the charitable trust in 1993, has meant that all the

revenues from the visitors to

Windsor and the Queen's other

official residences are put into this trust,

which then spends the money on all the things that help preserve and

present the collection as widely as possible.

So it's those people,

they actually pay for everything that you and the staff do.

That's right. You know, we have got now what are really now museum-scale

conservation teams, publishing teams,

all the disciplines you would expect to find in a large museum,

which simply didn't exist in-house 25 years ago.

How would you say it's altered the way the Royal Collection is thought of,

the way it's run, its day-to-day existence?

We've kind of begun to apply a sort of quasi-museum approach to it.

It isn't a museum, none of these palaces are museums,

but we've tried to classify the collection, to record it in a museum-y way,

and present it in that way.

But it is every single thing in every palace. That is the collection.

Buckingham Palace is still packed every summer.

What started as a stopgap cash raiser has created one of the most

popular tourist attractions in all of Britain.

All this is great PR for brand monarchy,

but it also helps to fund a royal art empire of galleries and

conservation studios for painting and the decorative arts.

For the last century-and-a-half, royal collectors, mostly women,

have turned to art at moments of adversity or threat.

But who could have predicted that a queen known for her love of racehorses

would urge the Royal Collection over one of the stiffest obstacles

it's ever had to face?

But has there been a loss alongside the gains?

With the modern focus on conservation and display,

rather than acquisition, has royal patronage become a thing of the past?

After spending a year studying royal collectors,

I'm finally about to meet one.

-Oh, look.

-Good morning, Your Royal Highness.

-Very good to see you.

-Very good to see you.

These are works from two portrait series commissioned by the Prince of

Wales - The Last Of The Few,

immortalising heroes from the Battle of Britain,

commissioned in 2010,

and The Last Of The Tide, veterans of the D-Day campaign,

commissioned four years later.

When my grandmother died,

I succeeded her as patron of the Battle of Britain,

you know, fighter pilots and, erm...

..so I used to have them to receptions,

and we gave them an annual tea party and things like that.

And so I knew them all,

it just seemed to me absolutely crucial to try and capture some of

them before they disappeared.

What a character this chap is!

He was such a dear man, I can't tell you.

He really was.

It seems to me that one gets so much more of a character from a drawing

-like this than one would ever get from a photograph.

-Yes, yes.

Well, I think, also, because the artist, if they're a really good artist,

has an ability to see through,

you know, the outer layer and into the inner layer.

-Yeah.

-That is the fascinating thing about artists, I think,

is how they capture the spirit,

or how they see you as a character.

It seems to me that what he's depicted here so brilliantly is

still the presence of a very young man within the old body.

That's still the young man who did do those heroic deeds.

Yes. But that is what he was like. He was always laughing.

So many different styles, I see. That's very different from, say, this,

where we seem to be almost in

the world of a modern Holbein.

That's what I feel. I mean, when I saw it, I thought,

having looked at those, I think

magical, Holbein drawings, you know,

in the Print Room at Windsor

for so many years,

it was in that sort of extraordinary tradition of economy of line,

and just a little bit of colour,

which is what Holbein did so brilliantly,

I always thought. But you felt with Holbein, he never took the pencil off the paper.

I don't think she did either, Ishbel Myerscough.

I love all of this, the furrowed brow.

He was another marvellous character!

Now, these were the ones that

I thought, again, that the D-Day veterans were all disappearing.

I mean, this one was done by

Professor Eileen Hogan,

who I think is brilliant.

Very interesting and unusual surface.

-Isn't it?

-What...?

Well, she told me she uses oil

paint, but also thin oil paint with wax.

-Ah!

-Do you see? She paints over the wax.

She was wondering, in the end, how the conservationists would mend it,

whether it's going to disintegrate or not, rather like Reynolds's ones,

-I don't know.

-Reynolds! He was a disintegrator!

He tried all sorts of things, didn't he?

Yes, I think they once found a tea bag lodged in a Reynolds'!

I love this chap. I think he's got such a face.

Tich. I just couldn't resist.

He was absolutely wonderful!

She really captured him.

It's astonishing.

I wouldn't have wanted to bump into him on a dark night!

I was going to say, on a dark night!

I love the way she's done it with the medals slightly twisted.

Leaping out of the canvas.

He really is. It's not the eyes that follow you around the room,

it's the whole person!

We're here, under the gaze of Albert,

and it strikes me very much as the kind of project that he would be giving the thumbs-up.

I've learned quite a lot from my great-great-great-grandfather, in the sense of observing, because

for instance, being brought up at Windsor Castle when I was young,

peddling my car up and down the corridors,

then suddenly, aged...

Everything on the walls was rather a blur when you were small,

but then suddenly, when I got to my teenage years, I suppose 13, 14,

suddenly they came into focus, and I remember stopping to really look.

It was a marvellous moment, really.

I just think it's important to keep the collection going in each

generation. And also, if you look at it...

..over all these hundreds of years, on the whole it's been the interests,

the personal interests of whoever it is, you know,

either the sovereign or the Prince of Wales, that has influenced the collection.

So some are more interested than others,

some preferred to have more of their friends or, you know,

relations or horses, dogs, carriages, you know,

occasional Cabinet ministers.

But that is what makes it, I think, to me, so interesting,

because it isn't just something that's trying to create a

representative collection, which of course, all the big galleries do.

-No.

-But this is sort of personal foibles, really.

For me, the great irony of the Royal Collection is that the

British monarchy, synonymous with conservatism,

should have built up a collection that's so eccentric, so out there.

You can see Buckingham Palace as a box filled by different people's quirks -

the whimsy of George IV...

..the sensual canvasses collected by Charles I...

..the diminutive, decorative arts of Queen Mary...

..and the artistic romance of Victoria and Albert.

You might almost see the whole of the Royal Collection as a wonderful

argument in object form, conducted between different generations of the

same family about what art might or might not be.

But for all their differences,

and despite the wonderfully British eccentricity of the Royal Collection,

the irregularity of its shape, all one-million-plus objects of it,

there is, I think,

one thread running through it all, namely the belief that art -

art! - should lie at the very centre of any civilised society.