Royal Family: Secrets Of The Royal Art Collection – HT
Every family has its heirlooms, but the royal family has over 1 million of them. Known as the royal collection, this artistic treasure trove holds everything from the crown jewels to royal portraits, precious ornaments, and priceless sculptures. The Royal Collection is the biggest private art collection in the world.
It really has an unbelievable amount of objects. It’s the world’s highest quality grab bag into which you can dive and find practically anything. The Royal Collection is estimated to be worth 10 billion pounds. The Royal Collection is the envy really of the world and certainly the envy of the art collecting world because it is so unique.
And behind every painting, jewel, and work of art lies an extraordinary story, the suspected jewel heist. This was one of the great jewelry heist mysteries of the 20th century and the truth behind some of our most celebrated national events. It actually snapped on the morning of her wedding day.
This is the secrets of the royal art treasures. Behind palace doors, largely hidden from view, lies one of the royal family’s most magnificent assets, the royal collection. We often quantify the Queen’s huge wealth in terms of palaces, but we mustn’t forget the Royal Collection. There’s 1 million objects.
It’s valued at 10 billion. The Royal Art Collection holds a vast range of items that includes much more than just paintings. The Royal Collection is one of the largest and most important collections of art in the world. Drawings, paintings, sculptures that form part of this collection. um and they are spread around 13 different residences including Buckingham Palace and Hollywood House at Edinburgh.
With some 7,000 paintings, a vast number are royal portraits and one face appears time and time again. Our Queen Elizabeth II. More than a hundred artists have painted the queen of course, but very often the occasion for a portrait, whether painted or photographic, has been some memorable occasion.
[cheering] Right through from the coronation through to the queen’s 80th birthday to the great jubilees. By sitting for a portrait, the queen is making herself accessible to the public. So I think it is another way of of the monarch um communicating to her subject. I here present unto you Queen Elizabeth your unduted queen.
One of the most iconic of these images captures her on the day of her coronation in 1953. The photo was taken by renowned society photographer Cecile Beaton. It looks as though the queen is sitting in the Lady Chapel at Westminster Abbey, but actually this portrait was staged in the throne room at Buckingham Palace using a photograph of Westminster Abbey as a backdrop.
And that really underlines that element of theater that is always part of royal portraiture and pageantry. But it was not until Charles I started collecting art on a mass scale in the 17th century that the foundations of the Royal Collection were laid. The royal collection as we know it really kicked off with Charles I.
He was like a little boy in a sweet shop. He began the royal collection on a staggeringly high level. Just as our own queen has done throughout the 20th century, Charles I filled the royal collection with portraits that projected a positive image of himself to his subjects. Charles I found the perfect painter for his royal propaganda campaign, Dutchmaster Van Djk.
Charles appointed Anthony Van Djk as his court painter in 1632 because he realized that Van Djk had the skills and sophistication to be able to strengthen Charles I’s public image and to promote his royal authority. Charles I’s reign would come to a bloody end with defeat to parliamentary forces in the English Civil War and his public beheading.
But in 1633, the increasingly unpopular king wanted to persuade his subjects of his divine right to rule. Realizing the power of his image, he commissioned Van Djk to paint one of the most striking works in the history of royal portraiture. It shows him on horseback coming through an archway and it’s a splendid symbol of royal portraiture at its most magnificent.
The king himself was actually a small man of 5’4. He looks like a giant on the back of his steed. The way he controls the horse almost is an emblem of his own ability to hold the reigns of power that he is besiding the British nation. He has the nation in his control. Once completed, Charles I found an imposing place in which to hang his new portrait.
It was deliberately placed at the end of a gallery in St. James’s Palace so that if we were a court here or a visitor coming in would be confronted with what looked like um the king on horseback coming towards us. The Queen’s artistic treasures, known as the Royal Collection, form the largest private art collection in the world.
Many of these some 1 million items are publicly displayed at Buckingham Palace and galleries around the country. Yet, the collection’s most iconic items are kept deep inside the Tower of London. It is here that the queen’s most cherished artifacts are guarded. The crown jewels. The crown jewels must surely be among the most dramatic and visible signs we have of our history.
For almost a millennium, the Tower of London has been considered the safest place. And really, where else would you keep this staggeringly valuable, staggeringly impressive collection? The crown jewels are the items used by the monarchy in sacred and historic ceremonies, most notably the coronation. The crown jewels really are the most powerful symbols of British monarchy.
Often called the regalia, made up of entirely different objects. There’s 143 of them, I believe. Crowns, scepters, plates, spoons, trumpets, all of them are encrusted with these incredible stones. I mean, you never see such big diamonds and pearls and and rubies. They’re the they almost look so big that you think they have to be fake. They’re so huge.
There are nearly 23,000 individual jewels embedded in the regalia of the crown jewels. But there’s some estimation that they could be worth 5 billion. So that’s an incredible sum. Every year 2 and a half million visitors see the crown jewels in one of the most heavily guarded locations in the capital, the Tower of London’s Jewel House.
The chances of stealing these are very slim indeed. There is um a roundthe-c clock protection operation that includes 22 guards, 100 security cameras and bomb-proof glass, which means you simply cannot get through to get those jewels. Of all the regalia on display, it is the crowns that generate the most fascination.
The crown jewels has three main crowns. St. Edward’s crown, the Imperial State crown, and the Queen Mother’s Crown. And the two that our queen wears are St. Edward’s crown and the imperial state crown. The last and grandest symbol of all is the crown of St. Edward. The St.
Edward’s crown was used to crown the queen in the historic coronation ceremony of 1953. So the St. Edward state crown has the arches. It is the heaviest. It weighs a whopping 2 kg. So when you’re sitting there waiting to be crowned and 2 kg comes onto your head, it it takes a lot of practice. In fact, the queen practiced very diligently for her coronation, putting books on her head really to practice what it would be like to carry 2 kg of jewels on there.
Although St. Edward’s crown is the most symbolically important of the three in the royal collection, it doesn’t hold the most valuable stones in the crown jewels. The St. Edward’s crown has 444 stones, but a lot of them are semi-precious like aquamarine, and it doesn’t have the gigantic diamond or a gigantic ruby that the Imperial State crown has or even the Queen Consort’s crown, the Queen Mother’s Crown.
It can be had, we believe, for a bargain price of 32 million. Once the Queen’s coronation ceremony was completed in Westminster Abbey, St. Edward’s crown was exchanged for the lighter but more valuable Imperial State Crown. The Queen, now wearing the Imperial State Crown, leaves the chapel to the strains of the National Anthem.
Which is probably the most instantly recognizable crown. It is the one that the Queen wears every year for the state opening of Parliament. My lord’s prayed. It has some 2,868 diamonds and weighs over a kilo. And the queen has said that you actually can’t look down while you’re wearing that crown because it is so heavy to wear.
So when you you see this thing actually moving, it’s a shimmering mass of light with all of these major stones set within. The third crown in the royal collection is not actually worn by the queen. Known as the Queen Mother’s Crown, it was made for Queen Elizabeth, consort of King George V 6th and mother to our current Queen.
The Queen Mother wore it for the 1953 coronation. Since then, it’s only been used in a royal ceremony once. When the Queen Mother died, it was placed on her coffin, and it won’t be worn again until we have another Queen Consort. And that will definitely be Princess Catherine who will become Queen Catherine next to King William.
And will it also be worn by Camila? Will she be crowned with Charles? The current approach to the royal family is that she will not be queen consort. She will not be crowned. She will be her title will be princess consort. But we shall see. The crowns may be the most symbolically important items in the royal collection, but it is the jewels encrusted on each one that really dazzle the crowds in the Tower of London.
The royal family owns some of the most splendid, extraordinary and expensive jewels in the world. And those sparkling diamonds, one of which is worth £400 million on its own that sits in the scepter, I think really represents the splendor and the glamour and the wealth of the royal family. Known as the Cullinin and one, this stone is the largest clearcut diamond in the world at 530 carats.
The Cullinan one is a remarkable stone. It’s almost flawless. It’s a beautiful white transparent stone, pear-shaped. The Cullinan one still remains the most supreme white diamond in the world. The Cullinan one was cut from a vast stone found in South Africa in 1905. This diamond, the largest ever found, yielded three other jewels.
The Cullinan 2 at 317 carats found in the Imperial State crown and the Cullinan 3 and four turned into brooches. While the Cullinin one is the most expensive diamond in the world, according to experts, the true value of the four Cullinins lies elsewhere. I think the real value lies in how they’re tied with British history and how they have shaped our history and our culture.
And so I think it’d be a very difficult thing to actually value. Although each jewel holds a unique story, many have controversial provenence. The Coenor diamond that sits in the Queen Mother’s crown has a particularly checkered history. Although its origins are unknown, it was in the possession of rulers based in South and West Asia before coming into Queen Victoria’s possession in 1849 when the British East India Company defeated the Seik Empire in Punjab.
It’s very strongly felt that it was not bought and not obtained fairly. was obtained under the force and oppression of empire and therefore the governments of India, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran have claimed it and said it is theirs and so far the British government have refused to give it back and said it belongs here.
Unlike the Coenor, the discovery of the Cullinan is very well documented. It was found at the Premier Mine owned by South African mining magnet Thomas Cullinan. This was probably the greatest historical find of any gemstone in the whole world. A worker was looking at the surface dumps and found glinting in the wall this huge crystal.
Took this out of a pocket knife, took it up to the mine office and weighed it and studied it and they had in their hands the largest diamond ever found at 3,16 carats. Absolutely incredible. Preparations were made for the stone to be transported to Britain where Thomas Cullinan’s agents would put it on sail and then once it was going to be shipped by boats to England, a replica was made and the actual real stone itself um went via just normal post in the post and the actual replica went in a special armed guard as a decoy stone.
The stone went on sale but due to its high price tag remained unsold after 2 years. It was eventually purchased by a South African politician and gifted to King Edward IIIth in 1907 as a symbol of unity after the Bur War. The stone was then transported by a train to Sandringham. It had his own firstass carriage with the royal detectives.
the head of Scotland Yard took it to King Edward IIIth and the rough stone um was gifted to him on his 66th birthday. With the largest rough diamond in history at his disposal, the king now had to decide how to cut it. Diamonds are very strong and so they had to find a person who would, you know, be very careful and not damage the stone in any way.
And so uh the the great company, the celebrated company Ashes of Amsterdam were appointed to cut this stone. And so they came to London. They studied the stone for a week to find out how to cut this thing. And remember this stone is fist size. Is as big as my fist. Joseph Asher was ready to cleave the stone. Um he lined it up.
He put the chisel in the top, smacked it with the hammer to break it, and the chisel broke. After another attempt, the stone was cleaved into four separate diamonds. The four Cullinin jewels are now the showpieces in the crown jewels. But beyond the items in the Tower of London, the royal collection is rich in other priceless regalia that bestow splendor and authority on whoever wears them.
as well as the jewels and the crowns in the royal collection which bring incredible visual splendor to the royal family. Um, coronets are also very very important. Um, they are essentially smaller crowns and I think probably the most famous coronet is the one that was used for the Prince of Wales’s investature.
The coronet for sovereignty. Prince Charles’s coronet took center stage in his 1969 investature ceremony. It’s incredibly unusual. It’s got an orb at the center of the piece with quite futuristic spikes around it, so it’s immediately recognizable. The royal collection provides the star items for any coronation or investature.
[cheering] Yet, weddings, too, are given a dash of glamour with treasures from the queen’s personal jewelry box. We’re most used to seeing tiaras at royal weddings, but we also see them at state receptions as well. And they are usually gifted within the royal family and handed down from one woman to another.
So there is that historical link. The tiaras are what we all have in our head when we think of a princess fantasy Disney style. On her wedding in 1947, the queen wore the Queen Mary fringe tiara given to her by her mother. There’s actually a great story behind it in that it snapped. It actually snapped on the morning of her wedding day and a palace aid had to rush it to the jeweler to uh mend it and then rush it back.
And if you look very closely, you can actually see the break there when it uh snapped because these are very delicate items. More recently, in 2018, Meghan Markle wowed the crowds at her wedding when she wore the Queen Mary diamond Bando tiara. But it was reported later that the tiara generated controversy behind palace doors. Megan had actually set her sights on another tiara from the royal collection, which wasn’t deemed suitable because it allegedly had stones from Russia, which wouldn’t have been suitable for a royal wedding. It has been speculated that
Megan’s first choice was the Vladimir tiara, an item thought to have joined the royal collection after the Russian Revolution in 1917. Encrusted with emeralds rather than the more common diamonds, it could have been an unusual choice for a wedding tiara. So, she was strongly urged to go for her second choice, and she did look beautiful in it on her wedding day, but the story is that there were tears and tantrums behind the scenes because Megan didn’t get the tiara that she wanted.
The royal family’s art treasures form an unparalleled collection of paintings, jewelry, tapestry, and objects. And these treasures serve a purpose when the queen holds a state visit. When the Obamas came to visit, they were shown a first edition of the book, you know, Birds of America, which I think the value on the open market was something like 11 million pounds.
They were shown a first edition of Harriet Beestow’s Uncle Tom Cabin signed by the author which you know has particular relevance for the first black president. And the queen apparently she herself is very up on the artifacts around the paintings at Windsor. She after dinner will often take visitors on a tour telling them exactly what they’re looking at.
A state visitor is not only shown the treasures of the collection, but they’ll also get to eat from one of its finest items. A state banquet is a glittering occasion, and a lot of that is due to the incredible dinner service. And this is George the Force dinner service. It’s silver and guilt and it’s just gigantic.
4,000 items. Took 25 years to assemble. And when the full banqueting table is unleashed, it can seat 160 guests. It’s not a dinner service, as you might imagine. The items don’t all match, but there are masses of them. There’s candelabra to act as centerpieces on the table. There’s the cutlery and the silver guilt plate.
It takes three days to lay the table. The service includes soup terines, salt sellers, and even its own set of butter molds and is the legacy of George IVth in the 19th century. George IV was a great spend thrift. He didn’t care whose money it was as long as it wasn’t his. the government were concerned that there was no heir and they felt that he should get married and produce an heir and he kind of blackmailed the government because he was in such debt he said okay I’ll get married but you got to pay my debts
first so the government paid his debts he got married he didn’t like his wife and he went back on a spending spree again and a lot of what we see in the royal collection today is as a result of George IV’s spending spree a state dinner takes 4 months to prepare and is ultimately overseen by the queen. The state visit is very important to the United Kingdom because it’s about relations.
It’s political relations, diplomatic relations, and hopefully trade relations. And the queen really does put on a tremendous show. And because she puts on a tremendous show because there she is. She’s head of state of the UK. And she will go and inspect it a couple of hours before the dinner actually takes place. If something is out of place, she’ll say it’s out of place.
and she has a very keen eye for perfection. And after dinner, the queen has also been known to give her guests a guided tour of some of the old masters that hang in the palaces. Perhaps some of the greatest collectors of more recent times are Queen Victoria and her consort, Prince Albert, who added their treasure to the royal collection.
I think Victoria and Albert part of their relationship was entwined through art. So I don’t think you can put enough emphasis on the fact that almost art was a glue that forged their love between themselves. So they both love drawing and etching. They both visited exhibitions together. They both sat for portraits and photographs.
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert shared a great enthusiasm for art, and they would often exchange artistic gifts on occasions such as birthdays and Christmas. Prince Albert especially was very knowledgeable. We owe a lot to Prince Albert. One of Albert’s big things was, you know, education.
His legacy in a sense is what’s been called Albertopoulos, you know, the complex of museums in South Kensington, the Victorian Albert Museum among them. So he really began putting things together so that the British people had a chance to see more of what the British monarchy were viewing every day. Victoria’s choice of art at times reveals the passionate relationship that the couple enjoyed such as Florinda by German painter France Zava Vinthalter.
This is a painting that Queen Victoria bought for Prince Albert’s birthday in 1852. And if you think of our slightly buttoned up straight laced idea of Queen Victoria, this picture looks rather surprising. you know, Queen Victoria is the monarch who famously when she visited the VNA museum, they had to go around and put fig leaves on all of the sculptures.
And what you’re looking at here is a picture based on a story of the princess Florinda and she’s gone out to bathe in a pool close to her castle in Toledo with her maidens. and all of them are in varying degrees of undress. Now, what Florinda doesn’t know is that the young Rodrigo is spying on her from behind the bushes.
And the story is that Rodrigo fell in love with her so passionately. He then seduced her which made her father the count so angry that he actually went out and encouraged the Arab invasion of Spain. And during the battle, Rodrigo was killed. What I find very interesting is that this painting was chosen to hang in Osborne House, the most intimate of the royal residences, over their working desks where Victoria and Albert would do their paperwork.
And so it was an image that they would both be enjoying on a daily basis. And I think being such essential image of semiclad women says quite a lot that they chose that um in their their private working space. Victoria and Albert always gave each other special Christmas presents. One year the queen commissioned Edwin Lancere to paint a portrait of Albert’s dog.
Edwin Lancere was Queen Victoria’s favorite artist and he even gave the Queen drawing lessons. He was particularly celebrated for his portrayals of animals. The painting of Albert’s dog, Eos, is a quite distinctive element in the in the royal collection because it shows this beautiful dog that Albert loved to bits.
In a way, it’s almost a portrait of Albert because it shows the dog standing by certain items of clothing of the princes, his hat and cane. It also shows elements of Albert’s personality because a dog is waiting for his master. He’s very affectionate. And these qualities of love and commitment were qualities that obviously he showed to not only his wife but also the the British nation.
Lancia’s paintings have been known to fetch millions on the open market. The value of EOS is doubtlessly increased by the significance it had for Victoria, particularly after Albert’s early death from typhoid at the age of only 42, leaving her a widow for the next 40 years.
The royal collection also holds special momentos of the other great loves in her life, her nine children. In the collection at Osborne House is a remarkable group of marble sculptures. They’re based on plaster casts that were taken from her children as they slept. Queen Victoria kept these marble sculptures in her private apartments at Buckingham Palace.
I think it tells us quite a lot about her love of her family and the fact that she wanted to project an image of of of a loving mother. Under Victoria and Albert, the royal archives also began to burgeon with a new form of art, photography. The Queen and her husband understood that the power of their image would be crucial to the success of Victoria’s reign.
And what Albert and Victoria did in particular was they presented themselves as the model family, as the perfect family, mother, father, children. But also, I think because of the reform act, because of the greater basis of middle-class power in terms of voting that was having power in the country, Victoria really is catering to a middle class and that very much is presenting herself as quite an ordinary, humbler looking family.
like these portraits in which Albert and Victoria are just looking like they’re chatting in Windsor Castle in which Victoria looks like any Victorian mid-century housewife. She’s got a very ordinary outfit on. They look like any ordinary couple, which was really quite revolutionary at the time.
Every king normally has himself painted in bling or intimidating. And here’s Victoria looking like anyone’s next door neighbor. But the art world is notorious for scandal and the royal collection is no exception. The art world is famously murky. The royal family are not immune from that side of the industry.
Most recently, Prince Charles came very close to having his fingers burnt when he agreed to take on 17 paintings from billionaire James Stunt, who was the exhusband of Petra Ecklestone. and he had offered these paintings to the Prince of Wales. They ranged from Picassos to Daries and the Prince of Wales loved them, thought they were fantastic, wrote to James Stump thanking him for the very kind loan and actually hung these paintings at Dumpreyy’s house.
The paintings were estimated to be worth over 200 million, but their real value turned out to be rather less. The problem was that it turned out that four of the 17 paintings were actually fakes. There was a Picasso in quotes, a Picasso, a Shagal, a Darly, and a Monet Waterly painting which were clearly fakes.
So this was a staggeringly embarrassing incident for Prince Charles and for the royal family. The story broke and was even more embarrassing when it was announced that a very famous art forger in America, a man called Tony Tetro, who still makes copies of paintings today, admitted that he had made these pictures at his kitchen table in California.
James Stunt has since denied any wrongdoing and told the media that all his art is genuine. The controversy led Prince Charles to immediately remove all the artwork from Dumpfrey’s house. It’s not unusual at all for works to be loaned all over the world, often on long-term for many, many years. But I think when you ensure four paintings like these, you’ve really got to know that you’re dealing with the real thing and that the person who they’ve been loaned from is a reliable and safe pair of hands, a serious collector.
Charles’s brush with illegitimate art wasn’t the first time that the royal family or their collection of treasures had been dragged into a scandal. Over 80 years ago, Edward VII was believed to have taken jewels from the royal collection as a gift for his lover Wallace Simpson. She was a woman who loved jewels.
She had wonderful taste in jewels. of this amazing collection that was worth millions and millions. Absolutely incredible collection. I suppose Edward thought it was fine to give jewels to Wu Wallace because she’d be the queen. But as it turned out, she wasn’t the queen and he had to abdicate his throne.
In 1946, the controversial former monarch returned to the UK with his wife for the first time since his infamous abdication. But in mysterious circumstances, all of Wallace Simpson’s jewelry, including the jewels from the royal collection, disappeared. They went out for the evening to the theater.
And Wallace Simpson was specifically asked beforehand would she like to pack away her jewels in a strong box. And she said, “No, no, it’s fine. They’re fine as they are.” But lo and behold, when they came back that evening, they found that a small box of jewels had been stolen. But the mystery deepened immediately because there was a string of pearls belonging to Queen Alexandra that was found on a local golf course.
And immediately there were conspiracy theories all over the place. It really all seemed a bit suspicious. Was it someone in the royal collections trying to steal the jewelry back or was it Edward himself trying to do some kind of insurance job? If you’re going to steal all that kind of jewelry, you would expect it to be immediately broken down, sold off, not end up in a golf course somewhere.
Despite an arrest for the theft being made in 1947, millions of pounds worth of Wallace Simpson’s jewelry was never found. This was one of the great jewelry heist mysteries of the 20th century. But the biggest scandal to hit the royal collection wouldn’t be fake art or a mysterious disappearance.
It would turn out to be the man in charge of the entire collection. After the Second World War had ended, the Queen’s father, King George V 6th, employed art historian Anthony Blunt, a surveyor of pictures and in charge of the royal collection. Anthony Blunt does fit in to a long line of of royal servants, but those who have been particularly associated with art.
He was a great art lover and he really was devoted to the art collection. After Elizabeth succeeded her father to the throne, Anthony Blunt continued in his role curating and maintaining all of the Queen’s art. And in 1956, he was rewarded with a knighthood. He was a very effective and very talented member of staff.
What is historically the most interesting? Well, I suppose rarely the three heads of Charles I which was executed for Charles I um and was to be sent to Rome. But whilst the art Anthony Blunt collected was authentic, his own identity turned out to be illegitimate. What the general public didn’t know is that Anthony Blunt had been one of the Cambridge spies during World War II.
He was involved in very serious spying and yet it simply wasn’t known. In 1964, MI5 discovered that Anthony Blunt was the fourth Cambridge spy alongside Donald Mlan, Guy Burgess, and Kim Philby. Together, they were considered among the biggest traitors in British history. Three of the spies had already defected to the Soviet Union after their cover was blown, but Blunt managed to keep his identity a secret, even from the British monarchy.
The man never had any access to any official secrets or any documents and all all that he had access to was in the royal collection, but he was seen as a threat at the time of his exposure. In return for a full confession, Anthony Blunt was granted immunity by MI5 and his espionage was kept secret from the public.
He continued to work for the queen as her surveyor of pictures until his retirement 10 years later. Amazingly, after this discovery, of which the Queen was told about, Anthony Blunt was allowed to continue working at Buckingham Palace and continued his relationship with the Queen, all the while knowing both him and her that that it had been discovered that he was in fact a spy.
Many spies were executed after the war, but Blunt certainly got away with it. The shocking secret remained under wraps until 1979 when Anthony Blunt was exposed by Margaret Thatcher in the House of Commons after she evoked her parliamentary privilege to reveal his true identity. Parliamentary privilege means that a MP can say something in parliament without being sued.
Mrs. Thatcher actually said it [applause] that Anthony Blunt had been a spy against the British interest and therefore it was really strongly felt that he simply shouldn’t have anned. Um, how how are you feeling? Just a moment. John Kros would later be uncovered as the fifth and final member of the spy ring.
But the discovery of Anthony Blunt, who had worked for over 20 years alongside the Queen, remains the most shocking. After 1964, you were still working with and for the royal family. How did you reconcile that with the fact that you are a traitor? I felt that I was I’d been given a job to do and I felt I could go on doing it for the Royal Collection.
When you made your confession, did the queen know? Well, this is a question again which I shall I like I would rather not discuss because my information is so to speak second if not secondhand is rather vague. He lost his nightwood um and he lost his job um and he died a lonely broken old man. How do you feel about being called a traitor now? I can’t deny it.
Hidden within the royal palaces are some of the most valuable and unusual pieces of art ever to have been made. The royal collection actually holds one of the most extensive collections of Faber objects anywhere in the world. There are around 600 objects and that ranges from the famous fab eggs through to flowers, commemorative plaques, jewelry, boxes.
Some of these treasures made by the jeweler Carl Faber were gifts that the Russian royal families would give each other for Easter. The enthusiasm for Faber pieces was soon taken up by their British royal cousins. One of the starting points for the Royal Collection of Faber was a commission made by Edward IIIth as a Christmas present for Alexandre sometime in the 1900s.
And what it is is a collection of carved hard stone figures of animals that were in the royal farm at Sandringham. Carved from all sorts of different stones, wonderfully skillful pieces of craftsmanship, semi-precious stones themselves, but perhaps a little garnets or rubies inset for eyes and things like that.
And they must have been a charming present to receive. But maybe the most iconic of the Queen’s collection is this bejeweled mosaic Easter egg. A gift given by Nicholas II, the last Zara of Russia, to his wife, the Tsarina. Inside are images of the Tsar’s children. It’s absolutely one of the masterpieces designed by a designer called Alma Pill, who had the idea for the egg when she saw her mother-in-law working on a piece of embroidery.
And that’s what the egg looks like. So, it’s a lattice work of platinum and into that platinum are inset all these different precious and semi-precious stones create this wonderful image of the egg. In 1917, the SARS were deposed in a bloody revolution and murdered in a house in Siberia. The eggs are one of the most iconic items of their rule.
This one was bought by Nicholas’s cousin, George V, in 1933 for £250. Today, it’s likely to be worth several million. And the Queen showed Kate her collection of Faber eggs. The Duchess said they were amazing. They’re amazing. These kept shut in a cupboard. Nobody can afford these things nowadays. I did have an opportunity of seeing a lot of the treasures in the royal collection up close, even to the point of actually holding a fab egg.
I had to put gloves on to do it, but holding a fab egg was quite exciting. Never own a piece like that, but holding it was quite special. The collection is so huge that sometimes there are treasures buried within it which have remained hidden for centuries. For over 300 years, this image of the calling of Saints Peter and Andrew lay in a store room at Hampton Court Palace until an Italian expert had a hunch that it might be the work of one of the world’s most celebrated painters.
Karavajio. He was most famous for his use of this technique called Kiarosuro, which literally means light and dark. the so very dramatic theatrical effects of light but also he was renowned because he used regular people who he met in the street in Rome for his sitters and that was seen as completely irreligious and revolutionary.
You know here were saints and apostles and images of Jesus and the Madonna but they were actually regular men and women just picked off the street with their rough interesting asymmetric faces. So that was seen as incredibly daring. The art conservation team decided to discover if the hunch was right. Could the queen’s picture be a lost caravajio? Conservators peeled off layers of dirt and dust.
They corrected things that have been badly restored in the past. And in doing so, at the end of 2006, there was this amazing announcement. This actually is the real loss Caravajio. And there are a number of ways that they could tell that this was the real painting connected to Caravajio’s very specific technique. So for example, he didn’t do underd drawings on his paintings.
Instead, he scored lines into the first layer of wet paint, usually using the handle of a brush and then he painted directly on top of that. And they found that technique as they did the X-rays and they did the conservation work on this painting. This work is now one of the most treasured in the Queen’s collection with some estimates valuing the painting at £50 million.
And I think it’s extraordinary to think that such an unrecognized masterpiece could have been sitting in the royal collections. But of course, the collection is vast. It has over a million objects which includes in the painting collection alone over 7,000 paintings. So there’s every possibility that there may be other hidden masterpieces in that collection waiting to be rediscovered.
The Royal Collection has grown for almost 400 years with many of its items on display to the public across the UK. It is part of the national heritage that we have this collection that we are lucky to have this collection and lucky that we are able to show this collection to millions of people every year. But with an already slim down monarchy and an eventual changing of the guard, what does the future hold for the royal collection? I’m not sure that any modern royals are collectors in quite the way that
some of their predecessors have been. The art world, the whole concept of where art lies is changing immensely. So, who knows what the future of the Royal Collection will be?