Masterpieces from Buckingham Palace

When Buckingham Palace embarked on its most extensive refurbishment since the Second World War, a decade-long, £369 million programme to replace ageing infrastructure throughout the building, the paintings normally displayed in the Picture Gallery had to be temporarily relocated. Rather than place them in storage, the Royal Collection Trust brought 65 of the finest works to the Queen’s Gallery, making them publicly accessible in a way they rarely had been before. Most of these paintings had only ever been seen by official guests and visitors on the annual summer State Room tours.

The exhibition was organised by school, moving through Italian, Dutch, and Flemish Old Masters, and presented the works at eye level rather than in the double-hung tiers of the Picture Gallery. Curators Desmond Shawe-Taylor and Rufus Bird framed each work around two questions: how and when the painting entered the Royal Collection, and what qualities might make it a masterpiece. Artists represented included Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt, van Dyck, Artemisia Gentileschi, Frans Hals, Pieter de Hooch, and Canaletto. Vermeer’s The Music Lesson was among the Dutch Golden Age highlights, admired for its disciplined perspective, the fall of light across the tiled floor, and the quiet suggestion of intimacy between the gentleman and the lady at the virginals.

The exhibition opened on 11 December 2020 and ran until 31 January 2022, an unusually long engagement that reflected repeated closures during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite those interruptions, it drew considerable attention when open, offering visitors a rare chance to study works normally seen only from a distance in a palace corridor or not at all. It was also the final major exhibition curated by Shawe-Taylor before his departure from the Royal Collection Trust following significant financial losses the organisation sustained during the pandemic.