Great Art, not a Great Exhibition

There are some stunning paintings to behold in Masterpieces from Buckingham Palace at the Queen's Gallery in London, particularly from the Dutch Golden Age. They've taken 65 works off the walls of the Picture Gallery next door in Buck House, which in normal times is only accessible to the public during the summer opening of the palace and is in any case currently being "reserviced". 

Instead of being hung in two rows, some above settees and fireplaces, the paintings are all at eye level for you to examine and admire close up. The curators invite you to linger and to consider what actually makes a masterpiece. 

There's Rembrandt, Vermeer, Rubens, Van Dyck and Canaletto. Some great art from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries from one of the world's greatest art collections, so we'll talk about the paintings first. Later on, we'll tell you why, in spite of the masterpieces on show, we found it a somewhat underwhelming exhibition, given the high standards of previous shows at the Queen's Gallery. 

If there's one era in art we're particularly fond of, it's the Dutch Golden Age. George IV was pretty keen on it as well and bought a lot of Dutch art for the Royal Collection, including four of the five Rembrandts in this show. There's a depiction of himself of course, a Self-Portrait in a Flat Cap, from his mid-30s, the period of his greatest success. There's the disconcerting Portrait of Agatha Bas, in which the sitter appears to approach you from out of the picture, her left hand grasping the trompe l'oeil frame Rembrandt has painted on the edge of the canvas and the almost three-dimensional fan she holds in her right seemingly extended towards the viewer over the bottom of the frame.

And then there's the action portrait: though not quite on the same scale as The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, but from just a year later, here is the young Rembrandt rewriting the rules for portraying married couples. Not two separate portraits, but one, as Griet Jans rushes into the office of her husband, the shipbuilder Jan Rijcksen, with an urgent message, or perhaps not so urgent, judging by the slightly irritated expression on his weather-beaten face.  

More stunning Dutch portraiture? Of course. Hanging right next to The Shipbuilder and his Wife is this one by Frans Hals, a Portrait of a Man from 1630. Not the artifice of Rembrandt's staged little drama, just the virtuosity of Hals's bold brushstrokes against a backdrop of precisely nothing. The black of the jacket, the white of the ruff and the cuffs. 

The first room of this show is given over almost exclusively to Dutch painters, and one wall is hung with a line of those scenes of the everyday that so characterise the Golden Age, with Gerrit Dou, Pieter de Hooch and Nicolaes Maes among the artists featured. 

The first painting highlighted on the audioguide by the curators in this exhibition, though, is Jan Steen's A Woman at her Toilet. She may be removing her stocking (you can see the mark left by the garter just underneath her knee) and looking straight at you with something of an alluring expression, but this is no streetwalker selling her body. The carpet on the table, the candelabra, the bed-hangings speak of wealth, as does something rather more intangible.... the natural light flooding in from the left, through what must be a large window. Poor homes were dark, the curators point out.

This is more than just an elaborate interior. We look at the scene through a grand doorway, and on the threshold are some unlikely objects: a lute with a broken string, a musical score, a skull with ivy growing out of it. They point to transience and death, and you can't escape that, no matter how rich you are. 

That tiled floor in Steen's painting is echoed in Vermeer's The Music Lesson, and the chance to get right up close to this painting lets you appreciate Vermeer's incredible ability to reproduce texture and the effect of light. You find yourself studying minutiae, like the brass studs that fix the blue fabric to the wooden frame of the chair, or the way that the light from the windows falls as a highlight on the intricately patterned carpet draped over the front corner of the table.  

It's Dutch art that dominates this show, closely followed by Flemish, largely in the shape of Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck, both of whom won so much favour with the Stuart royals that they were knighted. We tend to find their portraits more alluring than exuberant religious imagery or landscapes, and there was one Van Dyck double portrait here that really caught our attention. 

On the left sits Thomas Killigrew, a poet at the court of Charles I, who had recently lost his wife, Cecilia Crofts. In his hand he holds a design for her tomb, but he slouches as he stares at us in the distance full of melancholy. The sitter on the right is usually identified as Cecilia's nephew, William, urging Killigrew to write something on his blank sheet of paper, perhaps an epitaph. 

The final room of this show is devoted largely to Italian painting, and it's comparatively something of a letdown. We do get treated to some Baroque drama, most notably Cristofano Allori's Judith with the Head of Holofernes, but from the Renaissance period, Titian's Portrait of Jacopo Sannazaro isn't one of his most memorable works.

Among the paintings the curators invite you to focus on are Andrea del Sarto's unfinished Portrait of a Woman in Yellow and Parmigianino's Pallas Athene, but it's fair to say these don't have the same star quality as the art from the Low Countries you've been viewing earlier. 

It's Titian's contemporary, Lorenzo Lotto, who provides one of the high points. His Portrait of Andrea Odoni is, unusually, in landscape format. Odoni, a wealthy Venetian merchant, was an art collector, and here we see him surrounded by a wealth of antiquities from that collection. But, equally unusually, he's not absorbed in studying them; he's holding one statuette out to us, to share it with us.   

And finally Canaletto. There's one wall filled with four of his large early views of Venice from the 1720s, and what's really noticeable about them, compared with The Bacino di San Marco on Ascension Day from a decade later, is how freely painted they are. The clothing of the extras in the foreground, the sheets let down as blinds in front of windows -- these are often just squidges of paint when you look close up. Easy to imagine Hals or Rembrandt just adding a dab here, a bold stroke there in a similar way. Not perhaps what you expect from Canaletto.  

We found lots to admire in this show, but we came away vaguely dissatisfied. This felt, as an exhibition, a little flat. We had the slight feeling that they'd plonked a lot of fine paintings in front of us but then just left us to it. We appreciate that the curators wanted to make the paintings speak for themselves but the presentation and hanging seemed strangely monotonous. 

Sure, we know a wee bit about art, but we're always looking to an exhibition like this to expand our horizons, and for once, we felt we didn't really get anything new out of this one. There wasn't really a theme to the show as such. Just as an example, it might have been nice to learn something more of the history of the Picture Gallery, to have a feel for how it looks, how it works as a space, for example, for want of anything more substantial.

Normally at the Queen's Gallery there's a lot of additional material besides the paintings to look at, extra information to take in, or not, depending on the level of your interest. Here, side rooms that are usually filled with intimate objects or drawings were closed off. The galleries felt strangely empty, and we felt that despite the invitation to linger, they really weren't that keen on giving you anywhere to sit down. Coronavirus, perhaps, or just austerity? The Royal Collection has been shedding staff, including the Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, Desmond Shawe-Taylor, whose commentaries are still on the audioguide, even if he has physically left the building. 

When we went to see the Queen's Gallery show focused on Charles II at the start of 2018, a full-price ticket cost £11. It's £16 for this exhibition, and that's quite a big increase in just a few years, given how low the inflation rate has been. In our view, that's quite a lot to ask for this show, given the quantity and quality of the works you can see for free just up the road at the National Gallery. 

Practicalities

Masterpieces from Buckingham Palace is on until February 13 at the Queen's Gallery, right next to Buckingham Palace and less than 10 minutes' walk from Victoria Station with London Underground and main-line rail services. The gallery is currently only open Thursdays to Mondays from 1000 to 1730. As mentioned above, full-price tickets cost £16 including the audioguide and have to be booked in advance, which you can do here. Tickets can be converted into passes giving free readmission for a year. Allow yourself 90 minutes to see this show.

Images

Rembrandt van Rijn, Portrait of Jan Rijcksen and his Wife, Griet Jans (The Shipbuilder and his Wife), 1633, Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020
Frans Hals, Portrait of a Man, 1630, Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020

Jan Steen, A Woman at her Toilet, 1663, Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020

Johannes Vermeer, A Lady at the Virginals with a Gentleman (The Music Lesson), early 1660s, Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020

Sir Anthony van Dyck, Thomas Killigrew and (?) William, Lord Crofts, 1638, Royal Collection Trust
Parmigianino, Pallas Athene, c. 1535, Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020
Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of Andrea Odoni, 1527, Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020

Canaletto, The Piazza looking North-West with the Narthex of San Marco (detail), c. 1723-24, Royal Collection Trust