Dr Cordula Van Wyhe (University of York)

The fabric of Female Rule in Leone Leoni's statue of Mary of Hungary, c.

1555

Desmond Shawe-Taylor (Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures)

Abstracts

Desmond Shawe-Taylor

As part of a campaign to capture all of the information from the inventories held within the Royal Collection and Royal Archives, Royal Collection Trust is examining the comprehensive inventories of the collection made during the Regency period and at the same time considering William Henry Pyne’s The History of the Royal Residences of 1819. Together, these provide one of the most comprehensive accounts of an historic paintings collection. Accordingly, this talk provides an opportunity to stand back from what is essentially a mechanical task and examine what these inventories tell us about the display and appreciation of paintings in this period.

The purpose of the session is more to ask questions and to gather feedback from the audience than to provide theories, however, a number of key themes emerge. Firstly, the way in which, within the Royal Collection, long outdated decorative schemes survive alongside completely up-to-date ones and, secondly, how Old Master paintings seem to be valued for two, often quite separate, reasons, the aesthetic and the antiquarian. This period also allows us to contrast the collection of The Prince of Wales at Carlton House with the paintings accumulated at other royal residences.