THERE IS NO doubting that private collectors serve the public good. They do so variously, mostly through their patronage of artists, or by lending to exhibitions or making generous loans or gifts to museums. One major benefit from a private collection in recent times has been Lucian Freud’s bequest of Frank Auerbach’s paintings, valued at £16.2 million, which, under the AIL (acceptance-in-lieu) scheme, has gifted works by this artist to several regional art galleries in Britain, at a time when few, if any, could contemplate purchasing the same. But a still greater benefit came in March of this year when the Portland Collection went on public view at Welbeck, Nottinghamshire, in the newly opened Harley Gallery.

This is one of the finest aristocratic collections in England. Created by the dukes of Portland over a period of four hundred years, it is today in the ownership of a family trust. One of its trustees is William Parente, grandson of the 7th Duke and current owner of Welbeck Abbey, which remains a private home while opening its state rooms to visitors on pre-booked tours during August. The Portland Collection, however, is formidably diverse, containing pictures – among them many portraits – sculpture, objets d’art, items of royal provenance and manuscripts, and 4,937 items within it are deemed important enough to be exempt from inheritance tax, on the condition that a degree of access is granted. This has to an extent been achieved at Welbeck Abbey, but the family’s determination to give the public much greater access to the Portland treasures has led to the building of the Harley Gallery on the Welbeck estate.

Both the £7 million Gallery and its running costs have been met by the Harley Foundation,1 a charity set up by the family. The building combines crisp modernity with dignity and grace, and has an airy, light-filled foyer that nods towards Mies van der Rohe. The London architect Hugh Broughton took as his starting point the neighbouring ‘Tan Gallop’, an indoor riding school on an adjoining site for training racehorses that is a quarter of a mile in length. A similar thrust informs the two long galleries housing the current display, which ranges from masterpieces by Van Dyck, Stubbs and Reynolds to the pearl earring that Charles I wore at his execution. The centrepiece, however, is Michelangelo’s drawing, Madonna del silenzio, which featured in this Magazine in 1951,2 but has not been publically exhibited since 1960. It will remain on permanent view, while the temporary display of a hundred miniatures, selected and arranged by the artist Peter Blake, ends on 18th September. Entrance to the Gallery is free.

Yet the dominant model for this move from private to public remains the Royal Collection, within which are the Queen’s pictures. Although these are far outnumbered by the works on paper and even more so by the omnium gatherum category of the decorative arts, they yet amount to one of the greatest collections of paintings in the world. They are, however, not the Queen’s personal collection but held by her in trust for the nation. Since 1993 the Royal Collection as a whole has been administered by a charitable organisation, Royal Collection Trust, which is a department of the Royal Household. It is responsible for the care and conservation of the Collection and manages the opening to the public of the official residences of the Queen. Two of its stated aims are: to ensure that as much of the Royal Collection is seen by the public as is possible; and to enhance public appreciation and understanding of it. In connection with this second aim, the Learning Team mounts a varied programme of events for schoolchildren and adults. Last year 2.6 million people visited Buckingham Palace, Clarence House, Windsor Castle, Holyroodhouse and the Queen’s Galleries in London and Edinburgh. If we add in Hampton Court, Kensington Palace, Kew Palace (managed by Historic Royal Palaces) and Osborne House, the royal residence on the Isle of Wight (managed by English Heritage), then some four million people in the course of last year have had access to the Royal Collection – a figure that brings it into the same league as world-class museums and galleries. This is a huge advance on the situation that existed in 1952 when the Queen came to the throne, or even in 1962, when the Queen’s Gallery in London opened, but with a remit to mount only one exhibition a year.

The Queen’s pictures amount to over 7,000 works, three times the number of paintings in London’s National Gallery. The fact that this country has retained a royal picture collection makes the National Gallery special, for unlike the Louvre, the Prado, the Hermitage or the Uffizi, it does not owe its origin to a collection formed by a monarch or a ruler but has been built by the public. Yet it is not surprising that in 1991 ‘The Queen’s Pictures’ was the exhibition chosen to inaugurate the Sainsbury Wing, for there are close links between the National Gallery and the Royal Collection. Between them they own some of the greatest masterpieces in the history of western European painting.

The decision to make the royal picture collection, with its large and significant groups of works by Van Dyck and Canaletto and its rich holdings in Dutch and Flemish art, better known is a relatively recent phenomenon. The collection began some five hundred years ago, yet the business of publishing catalogues raisonnés, the most recent of which includes the new edition of Sir Christopher White’s Dutch Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty The Queen (2016), only began in earnest in the current reign. The back history of this collection is less edifying. It is well known that after Charles I’s death, the Commonwealth sold off his collection or used it to pay bills; and that requests for the return of these pictures during the reign of Charles II had only limited results. But although the collection continued to grow with each change of monarch, it was not consistently recorded or managed with the attention it needed. The Surveyors of the collection were often painters and not necessarily skilled at administration. The Victorian Richard Redgrave is said to have been the first to ‘order, marke [sic] and number’ the paintings. Benedict Nicolson, before coming to this Magazine as Editor, acted as Deputy Surveyor to the King’s Pictures, first under Kenneth Clark and then, after the War, under Anthony Blunt, and his return to original documents concerning the pictures is said to have laid down the basis for subsequent cataloguing.

An inevitable tension exists between the use of these pictures – within what essentially still is a private, if royal, collection – and their status as part of our national heritage. While on the one hand these paintings uphold power or an expression of aesthetic taste, they also play a role in the furnishing of a scattered number of royal residences. When the State Apartments at Windsor were rebuilt in Charles II’s reign, many paintings were either cut down or enlarged in order to make them fit over doors or above fireplaces. And this practice, as a former Surveyor, Sir Oliver Millar, has put on record,3 continued to disadvantage paintings, at Balmoral or wherever, whenever they were made to serve the refurbishing of a room, before the more recent adoption of modern curatorial methods.

Looking back over the twentieth century, it is difficult to identify a major example of artistic patronage on the part of the royal family. But there is general agreement that a significant commission came from Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Consort, later the Queen Mother. She had an eye for pictures and took an interest in the Royal Collection, and in 1941 she invited John Piper to paint twenty-four watercolours of Windsor.4 It was hoped that these would be as eloquent as those of Windsor Castle that Paul Sandby had produced in the eighteenth century in a series of calm and serene views. Piper, on the other hand, let the angry melancholy of the wartime mood darken his neo-romanticism. In the spring of 1945, when all twenty-four watercolours were completed, he was invited to Windsor to show them to the King and Queen. The latter readily made appreciative comments, but the King remained noticeably silent, until he uttered the now famous remark: ‘You seem to have had very bad luck with your weather, Mr Piper’.5

Our present Queen is unlikely to be remembered as a major patron of art, yet it has been in the course of her reign that the care, conservation and stewardship of this world-renowned picture collection, and access to it, has immeasurably increased. What used to be managed by two men in a book-lined room is now the responsibility of an extensive professional staff, including eight painting conservators, while a brand new conservation studio (for furniture and arms and armour) is currently being built, to add to the five conservation studios for the care of paintings, works on paper, books, furniture, ceramics, metalwork, armour and decorative surfaces in London and Windsor. In addition to the active programme of exhibitions and events across the royal venues, loans are sent out around the world, feed into our national collections and make significant contributions to exhibitions such as the National Gallery’s ‘Painters’ Paintings’ where the visitor will find Van Dyck’s Thomas Killigrew and William, Lord Crofts (Fig.I). Meanwhile a new selection of ten Leonardo drawings, including one of his Deluge series , from the prints and drawings collection at Windsor, is currently touring the country. All this is evidence, should it be needed, that what belongs to Her Majesty has, through its public reach, greatly enhanced the cultural life of this nation and beyond.

1 The Foundation and Gallery are named after the eighteenth-century collector Edward Harley, whose daughter married into the Portland family.

2 See the THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE, 98 (1951), pp.278-79.

3 See C. Lloyd: The Queen’s Pictures: Royal Collectors through the Centuries, with an essay by Sir Oliver Millar, London 1991, pp.20–21.

4 These are discussed in S. Owens: ‘Evocation or topography: John Piper’s watercolours of Windsor Castle’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE, 147 (2005), pp.598–605. See also F. Spalding: John Piper, Myfanwy Piper: Lives in Art, Oxford 2009, pp.191–92 and 197–202.

5 This remark, as reported by Benedict Nicolson, was recorded by James Lees-Milne in his diary, 10th July 1945. See J. Lees-Milne: Prophesying Peace, London 1977, pp.211–12. Piper himself later recounted the reactions of the King and Queen on Desert Island Discs, BBC Radio 4 (16th December 1968).