When Queen Victoria died in 1901, having spent decades in black-clad mourning, a “stuffy establishment” passed with her, said Rachel Campbell-Johnston in The Times. By the time of her son’s coronation in 1902, to the strains of Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance Marches”, Britain must already have seemed a different place – a land of hope and glory, but also of “glamour and extravagance”.
A “portly glutton” with an insatiable appetite for the finer things, Edward VII embodied his pleasure-loving age. He reigned for nine years with his Danish-born consort Queen Alexandra – an elegant woman whose taste in dresses and jewellery set trends in their gilded circle; even her limp was copied by courtiers (they called it the Alexandra glide). They were succeeded by George V, their son, and Queen Mary, who also travelled the empire widely, cramming their residences with yet more precious art and objets.
This exhibition consists of “paintings, sculpture, jewellery, furniture, books, photographs and ceramics” from the Royal Collection, and explores a period that was glamorous and confident, but in transition: new technologies were emerging; artistic practices were shifting (from the aesthetic movement to the first stirrings of modernism); political discontent was rumbling; and a shattering world war was just years away.
The royal family lived in splendour: Edward VII liked to carouse with his mistresses in a copper bath filled with champagne; he kept his cigarettes in a diamond-encrusted Fabergé case. And so the show, which begins in 1863 with his marriage to Alexandra, contains no end of sumptuous objects, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph, including “a brooch with emeralds thicker than my thumb, and a fan with a poor hummingbird set, like fruit upon plate, within a disc of fluffy white feathers”.
We see some of the paintings the couples collected – by the likes of Frederic Leighton and Lawrence Alma-Tadema; and the exquisite trinkets they acquired: “ornate candelabra and hand mirrors, cigarette cases and snuffboxes, and stunning Cartier ‘objets de luxe‘”. If all that were not grand enough, the second gallery looks at court life, with huge canvasses of lavish state events and portraits of the royals in all their finery.
Alexandra comes across as “the Diana of her day”, said Melanie McDonagh in The London Standard – a style icon with an eye for effect. She had a lovely neck, and popularised the choker; and she had her coronation gown covered in gold gauze and diamante, so that it would glow under the new electric lights. More sobering is a photo of Kaiser Wilhelm II at the unveiling of the Victoria Memorial – an event he attended with George V, his first cousin, in 1911, three years before their nations were plunged into war. The last room shows images from the Great War, including one of the king in procession behind the coffin of the Unknown Soldier. “It was the end of an era, the end of a world.”
The King’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London SW1, 0303 123 7301, rct.uk. Until 23 November
The splendour of Edward VII and Queen Alexandra is on display at Buckingham Palace
