Kirsten Tambling considers how Queen Mary’s attentive collecting served the Royal Collection
Many British monarchs have enjoyed buying works of art, but few have paid as much close attention to the Royal Collection as Queen Mary – who can be regarded as one of its leading curators
Oh! dear, oh! dear if only I could find the history of all these things, how interesting it w[ou]ld be,’ sighed Mary, Princess of Wales in , ‘but alas there is no inventory, nothing.’ On this occasion the subject of regret was a recently purchased group of silver candelabra bearing the cypher of George IV. However, the despairing desire for an inventory was a common exclamation from Mary, who, from , reigned as queen consort to George V. Until her husband’s death in , Queen Mary held joint sway over the entirety of the Royal Collection – then, as now, one of the largest surviving private collections in the world. She swelled its holdings (‘my one great hobby’), adding more than , paintings, books, photographs, and decorative-art objects, including a significant collection of Chinese jade and hardstones (Fig. ). She appears beside some of her jade in a photograph of by Emil Otto Hoppé (later reproduced in the Illustrated London News), her hand on a glowing vitrine, gazing down at its contents (Fig. ).
However, Queen Mary also devoted herself to ‘arranging’ such parts of the collection as fell under her notice, considering that many things ‘were changed [at Buckingham Palace] at Windsor much too quickly by our predecessors’. Acting as half curator, half inventory clerk, and frequently passing her discoveries on to her Surveyors (Lionel Cust and, later, C.H. Collins Baker), she found that she could ‘simply spend hours going over the Castle, matching things up, finding pairs to pieces of furniture etc’. The desire to bring administrative order to perceived chaos feels characteristic of the staid and solid woman now best remembered as Elizabeth II’s dowager grandmother. Even so, the enjoyment of the task occasionally drew the queen consort to unexpected grammatical excess. A letter of breathlessly describes ‘routing out nice old furniture things in the Palace stores which no one but the Furniture inspectors had touched for years!!!’.
In organising and adding to the Royal Collection, Queen Mary illuminated parts of its history, but she also helped solidify the identity of the British monarchy in the early th century as enduring, family-focused and, where necessary, thrifty. ‘It is really rather wonderful what we have managed to collect get together since we
married, quite a creditable collection of family things […] without spending much money over it,’ she wrote, voicing a concern that had never troubled her great-uncle, George IV, in his weekly purchases of jewellery, military uniforms and gold boxes. Among these ‘family things’ were two large pendants of Frederick, Prince of Wales and his wife, Augusta, possibly painted to commemorate their marriage in 1736. Allegorical cherubs gambol about the curtains and architecture; the paintings are sometimes attributed to William Hogarth, on an opportunistic mission to secure royal patronage. Queen Mary bought them in 1929. Framing acquisitions like these as modestly acquired relics of great-grandparents allowed Mary to participate in an ongoing attempt to remodel the British monarchy as a royal ‘family’ above all else. This project had begun with the first scions of the Hanoverian line – the bluff George III was remembered by the publisher Charles Knight as ‘that most respectable and amiable of country squires’ – but had been solidified by Victoria and Albert, who redefined themselves, with Windsor as their emblem, as (in the words of one journalist writing in 1895) ‘a model home at the apex of English society’.
This point was duly recognised by many of the writers reporting on Mary’s activities. In 1932, the Illustrated London News wrote that she ‘ha[d] always loved home life, and while cultivating the domesticities ke[pt] an ideal of
“the home beautiful”’, and even found time between official engagements for ‘various hobbies, especially that of collecting art treasures […] and bric-à-brac’. Projects such as the ‘Chinese Chippendale Room’ , begun by Queen Mary at Buckingham Palace in 1912 with the assistance of the interior decorator Charles Allom (who would later work on the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel) encapsulated this vision of the ‘home beautiful’. ‘Treasures’ were here arranged as part of a plush, 18th-century inspired domestic environment, the green furnishings and Orientalist swirls linking the room thematically with its generally Chinese contents.
However, for Queen Mary, arranging and adding to the Royal Collection often went hand in hand with combing through the history of that collection, and particularly the lessons it offered in royal family history. Many of the items in the Chippendale Room were not newly acquired, but simply moved from elsewhere in the royal residences, and most of the paintings she bought – including Frederick and Augusta – were portraits of royal predecessors. A curious (and anonymous) depiction of Charles II being presented with a pineapple effectively combines an image of a monarch with a key piece of historical, horticultural anecdote (Fig. 3). Images of George III and his children, similarly, abounded on the gold boxes and miniatures she acquired and arranged, lovingly, both in themed rooms, and in museum-style vitrines. A room in the Round Tower
at Windsor was given over to a display of specifically ‘family’ souvenirs and ‘relics’, as was the ‘Lace Room’, and part of Frogmore House, a sporadic royal residence until the s. Though immediate family history always exerted a special force, Queen Mary’s interest extended, too, to the more romantic of the Stuarts: the likenesses of Mary, Queen of Scots, the Old Pretender, and Bonnie Prince Charlie gazed out from walls and cases at Holyrood House, and in a dedicated ‘Stuart Room’ at Windsor (Fig. ). Selected results of her routs in the stores were also made public, lent to a dedicated ‘family museum’ at Kensington Palace, established in along the lines of the Musée Carnavalet in Paris. Subsequently moved to Lancaster House, and retitled the ‘London Museum’, its galleries displayed a motley selection of memorabilia from the Royal Collection: the cradles in which notable babies had been rocked; the chair in which Queen Charlotte had died, and Mary’s own wedding dress and trousseau. The project itself would later become the Museum of London.
Mary’s lifelong fascination with royal history and the Royal Collection reflects her own reverence for the throne – and, possibly, her own uneven path to it. Born Princess Victoria Mary of Teck in , and known until her accession as ‘May’, she was the only daughter of Francis of Teck, and Princess Mary Adelaide. The larger than life and perenni- ally cash-strapped Mary Adelaide had an unimpeachable ancestry as the daughter of George III and Queen Charlotte’s youngest son, Adolphus, making her a cousin of Queen Victoria. Her husband, Francis, a prince of Württemberg whom she married at the late age of , was the product of a morganatic marriage, and therefore of lower rank. Once established as queen consort, and thereby free of the awkward consequences of this ambiguous social status, Mary was always attentive to the Württemberg lines of ‘the family’, and felt a particular affinity with Queen Charlotte, a queen consort with her own roots in what is now north-eastern Germany. Like Mary, Charlotte had had a yen for collecting, particularly in the decorative arts (Josiah Wedgwood commemorated her support in the title of his cream-coloured ‘Queen’s Ware’) and much of Mary’s work on the Royal Collection emphasised her sense of trans-historical affinity with her predecessor. A portrait of Charlotte as Princess of Mecklenberg-Strelitz, by Johann Georg Ziesenis, was presented to Mary by a member of the Rothschild family in . In , she established a ‘Wedgwood Room’ next to her sitting room at Windsor, combining items from the Collection, many with a link to Charlotte, with ‘a few old Wedgwood China things of my own’. Around the same time she acquired Ziesenis’s portrait, Mary also obtained a fan depicting Charlotte’s marriage to George III (Fig. ) and, in the following year, purchased a biscuit porcelain group of the couple and their family based on the portrait by Johan Zoffany (Fig. ).
Many of Mary’s thoughts on these acquisitions survive thanks to her longstanding correspondence with the Schloss Neustrelitz’s th-century occupant, the Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Until her death in , ‘Aunt Augusta’ remained a favourite confidante in life and in politics: having grown up in England with a fervent, if unorthodox, belief in the divine right of kings, she shared her niece’s reverent devotion to royal tradition and history. For Mary, the duchess’s age – she had been born in – also made her something of an archive in herself, and a frequent recourse for the queen consort when inventories
and other forms of written record were wanting. Neustrelitz had its own ‘family museum’, assembled around the same period as Mary’s ‘arrangements’, and for both aunt and niece the care of royal objects spoke directly to the great themes of inheritance, ancestry and royal legitimacy. ‘Only think they even sold […] the garter robes worn by Charles I. It makes my blood boil to think that all these historical souvenirs should have disappeared,’ Mary exclaimed to Augusta on reading a copy of the 1649 sale catalogue of ‘the late king’s goods’, significantly conflating the dispersal of a collection with the deposition of its owner.
Mary’s own accession to royal robes had come, ultimately, through the good opinion of Queen Victoria. Finding her ‘v[er]y carefully brought up & so sensible’, the ageing queen came to consider Princess May, as one of the comparatively few great-granddaughters of George III not directly descended from herself, an almost uniquely eligible mate for one of her less than sensible grandsons. In 1891, she was engaged to the heir presumptive to the throne, Prince Albert Victor, firstborn son of Edward, Prince of Wales. It was hoped that the match would help cure ‘Eddy’ of his general ‘apathy and disinclination to work’, but the engagement was hardly established before it was dissolved by his death, during a resurgence of the 1889–90 European flu pandemic. In the period of mourning that followed, Eddy’s younger and distinctly more reliable brother, George, Duke of York, succeeded to the twin positions of heir presumptive and fiancé to Princess May. As George V and Queen Mary, the couple ruled for 26 years, and became avatars of continuity, fixed and unalterable, so much so that Mary kept her hairstyle much as it had been on her wedding day in 1893 until her death in 1953.
Queen Mary’s contributions to the Royal Collection have not gone unremarked: the Dolls’ House assembled for her between 1921 and 1924 by Edwin Lutyens and one of Queen Victoria’s more obscure grandchildren, Princess Marie Louise, is a staple of the Windsor Castle tourist route. However, her habits of collection and, particularly, curation have largely been eclipsed in the popular imagination by the activity and acquisitions of showier predecessors, and primarily monarchs, rather than consorts. The lost collection of Charles I included Renaissance masterpieces purchased to compete with the princely collections of Europe; George III accidentally acquired Vermeer’s Lady at the Virginals with a Gentleman as part of a job lot of Canalettos in 1762. As well as gold boxes, bibelots, prints and drawings, his son George IV also accumulated a significant number of Dutch Golden Age paintings, his relentless acquisitiveness went hand in hand with his legendary self-indulgence. After the death of George IV in 1830, the gossipy courtier Charles Greville recorded the distressing state of his more informal collection: ‘[T]here never was any thing like the quantity of trinkets and trash that they found. He had never given away or parted with any thing.’
Queen Mary did not think much of Greville, whose memoirs she read in 1909 and pronounced ‘ill natured’, but his description of George IV’s ‘trinkets and trash’ must, even so, have resonated. As both an aficionado of the English 18th century, and also an avid collector of bibelots, miniatures and objets d’art, Mary was always interested in the collecting and notation practices of one of the Royal Collection’s most significant contributors. She acquired dozens of miniatures and intaglios bearing George IV’s likeness and, when a group of his bills resurfaced in 1913, sat down with a pencil to comb through them, identifying those items she could, and informing future archivists where in the residences she had put them. This activity complemented the focus of her acquisitions, which usually had some kind of prior claim, either because they represented members of the royal family, or because they had previously been owned by one of them. The source for the biscuit group, Zoffany’s portrait, remains in the Collection today, and a miniature reproduction of the Ziesenis painting had previously been set into a gold box by Charlotte’s son, George IV (Queen Mary displayed it in a vitrine at Windsor, beside a number of other images of Charlotte and her children).
In general, Mary frequently sought to fill gaps in the collection, or supplement its strengths, rather than seeking to impose a new identity on the holdings. As such, her activities were almost pointedly self-effacing: tidying the chaotic leavings of princely collectors past, and reversing regrettable dispersals. The sale of Charlotte’s private collection in 1819 (‘a sacrilege’) and George IV’s gold and jewellery in 1830 were often on her mind as she trawled