London, Buckingham Palace picture gallery masterpieces on display for the first time

The Queen’s Gallery in London is presenting for the first time an exhibition in which all masterpieces from the Buckingham Palace Picture Gallery will be brought together.

The exhibition, titled Masterpieces from Buckingham Palace, will open to visitors on December 4, 2020, and will be accessible until January 31, 2022.The sixty-five paintings that are usually kept in the Picture Gallery, among the most significant works of the Royal Collection, will then be on public view. These include masterpieces by Titian, Rembrandt, Vermeer, van Dyck, Canaletto, and many others.

Moving the paintings from the Picture Gallery, as a result of which the exhibition was made possible, is part of the palace’s maintenance program.

One of the themes addressed in the exhibition will be the painterly skills of certain artists, visible for example in Rubens ’Self-Portrait of 1623, where the application of bright color pigments masterfully renders the complexion, and blue and red strokes help create the impression of three-dimensionality. Other themes highlighted by various works are then realism, the atmosphere that makes realistic characters and places portrayed, and illusionistic effects.

The exhibition will also recount the evolution of the Picture Gallery after the acquisition of Buckingham Palace by George III and Queen Charlotte in 1762. Their son George IV commissioned architect John Nash to transform the palace into the royalty’s principal residence in the 1920s. Part of Nash’s plan was to create the Picture Gallery that would house the collection of paintings that George IV owned, with works by the greatest Flemish, Dutch and Italian masters.

The Picture Gallery was first opened to the public during the reign of Queen Victoria, when the royal family was not in the palace.

Among the masterpieces that will be on public view at the exhibition are Titian’s Madonna and Child with Tobias and the Angel, Cristofano Allori’s Judith with the Head of Holofernes, Jan Steen’s Woman at the Bath, Canaletto’s Basin of St. Mark on Ascension Day, and many others.

Image: Cristofano Allori, Judith with the Head of Holofernes, detail (1613; oil on canvas, 120.4 x 100.3 cm; Royal Collection)

London, Buckingham Palace picture gallery masterpieces on display for the first time

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