Visual art review: Treasures From The Queen’s Palaces, Queen’s Gallery, Edinburgh

QUEENS in fairy stories have treasures. Usually in the illustrations these look like golden chocolate coins and boiled sweets and there is a gold belt in Treasures from the Queen’s Palaces, the latest show at the Queen’s Gallery, with enormous emeralds along its length which looks just a bit like that, the jewels are so over the top.

There is also a fabulous golden crown that belonged to the last Mughal Emperor. Plainly it is not chocolate and Queen Victoria bought it at auction. The Emperor’s treasures were ignominiously sold off when he was deposed after the Indian Mutiny to be replaced, of course, by Victoria herself. Maybe she thought she needed it.

Nevertheless, clearly our present monarch is not a fairytale queen. Indeed, a dozen years ago an exhibition like this might have been unthinkable so low was the royal stock in public esteem. That has all changed. By sheer longevity, extraordinary personal dignity and unswerving focus on her job, the Queen has come through. She has persuaded us that she is there for us, and not for herself and her dysfunctional family, and now we are all rejoicing at her diamond jubilee. It would be churlish to do otherwise than admire her, if only because she is in high office and, unlike so many others, appears to live by principle. Nevertheless this astonishing display of riches does raise the nagging question of who exactly it is all for. Is it, like the treasures of the queens in the fairy stories, simply a function of her status, or is it actually family wealth accumulated at our expense? Can these treasures still mean the same thing as they did when they were acquired by monarchs long ago? It is ambiguous. If they are part of our royal heritage, they are also part of her family inheritance. After all, her collection is often called the greatest private collection in the world. In practice a distinction is made, I understand, between what is privately hers and what belongs in a less personal sense to the crown. I don’t suppose that has ever been put to the test, so I wonder what status all this really has as public property.

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These are no doubt idle speculations. Republicans are few among us and such as there are, they are on the back foot right now, but it is worth remembering that great collections like the Louvre and the Hermitage are former royal collections, now public property. We have instead the Queen’s Gallery and its equivalent at Buckingham Palace. Both are very small points of access indeed to such a fabulous collection.

Nevertheless, in spite of these questions, the Queen’s Gallery is a marvellous asset. We have seen some wonderful things there. Indeed you could argue that these curated shows drawn from the apparently inexhaustible resources of the Royal Collection actually offer a better experience than tramping round miles of galleries and corridors with bus loads of tourists to try to see the whole thing.

The present show is a sampler designed to dazzle, however, not to raise disloyal questions and indeed it does dazzle. There were crowds of the faithful too, far more than I have seen at previous shows. It may just be loyal subjects inspired by the Jubilee. After all, like the fairytales, treasures are what we expect of royalty. But don’t be put off. This is not a display of Fabergé eggs, royal wedding dresses and photos of the Queen as a Girl Guide. There is some wonderful art here.

The royal collection of drawings is one of the greatest in the world. To prove it there is a selection by Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and Holbein, four of the greatest ever draughtsmen. There are drawings by Rubens, Poussin and Canaletto and others too, but a self-portrait by Bernini and a presumed self-portrait by Annibale Carracci, being less familiar, were two that I found most striking and indeed moving.

Miniatures, portraits that are often also actual jewels, are the most personal of art forms and so when their subjects are royal, they often give a special insight lacking in more formal portraits. There is a wonderful group of miniatures here including Mary Queen of Scots and her son, James VI, both by Nicholas Hilliard. The latter is a particularly telling portrait. So too is Isaac Oliver’s portrait of James’s Queen, Anne of Denmark. In it we see a lively and intelligent woman, quite different from any other portrait I have seen of her. The miniatures continue down to Victoria and Albert and members of their family. It is disappointing in this context, though, that there is nothing by Andrew Robertson, Raeburn’s most successful pupil and a miniaturist of the royals in the early 19th century. There are also actual jewels fit for a fairy tale and several superb cameos including a portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, looking unpleasant as ever even in this stylised format, and a magnificent Roman cameo of the Emperor Claudius.

The paintings are the main thing, however, and they do not disappoint. The earliest is Lorenzo Lotto’s dramatic portrait of Andrea Odoni, merchant and collector. A magnificent Frans Hals gives us the living presence of a plump, successful Dutchman, his self-importance in striking contrast to the languorous self-confidence of two English courtiers by Van Dyck hanging alongside. Rembrandt’s portrait of Agatha Bas would be a star in any collection. Like the Hals portrait, hers is a living presence, but the effect is quite differently achieved. Hals conveys the transience of any social exchange, Rembrandt with a much more careful image gives us a sense of the physical presence of the sitter. She is tangible and seems to exist in the same space as us. There are several other fine pictures including a magnificent Rubens landscape, a Canaletto and Hogarth’s portrait of the actor David Garrick and his wife, but Claude’s magical Rape of Europa is the star for me. The scene is the seashore. There are ships at anchor. Snowy mountains in the distance suggest a bright spring day. Europa, surrounded by her friends, is the picture of anxious innocence as she sits sidesaddle on the bull - Jupiter in disguise - that will carry her off across the sea. A fresh breeze begins to whip up little white horses from the blue sea, just a hint of violence to come. The lightness and delicacy of the figures is at one with the lively freshness of the landscape. Claude is the father of landscape and this one of his finest works.

The other picture which above all the others made this show for me is Wilkie’s Penny Wedding, a Scottish masterwork back in Scotland for the first time in years. A picture of a wedding dance and a celebration of Scottish rural life, it is the very embodiment of the Enlightenment ideal of a society at peace with itself. Painted in 1818, however, the Clearances and the corresponding rise of a new industrial proletariat in dark, chaotic cities were making this Enlightenment ideal increasingly remote and so the picture is set, not in the time it was painted, but in the past, in the time of Burns and of the fiddler Neil Gow whose music, in the picture, leads the dance, symbol of social harmony. The picture is complement to the painter’s Distraining for Rent in the NGS, a sharply contrasted painting of the modern world. The first shows the world ordered according to Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiment. In the second it is subject simply to raw economics. The old harmonies are gone and the social fabric is torn asunder. The pictures are two halves of one story that is very topical still.

Rating: ****

• Until 4 November