Heritage II - Richard Cork discovers the Queen Mother was a daring patron of contemporary art
The Royal Collection boasts some superlative paintings and drawings from the premodern period, but the Queen has never displayed a discernible passion for art. True, she has spent many hours posing for lamentable portraits, and even submitted herself to the uncompromising scrutiny of Lucian Freud. But I cannot name a single outstanding work of art purchased by the Queen. As for Feliks Topolski's Coronation frieze, commissioned by the Duke of Edinburgh in 1959 and now on special exhibition at Buckingham Palace, it is a slapdash affair that degenerates into a wearisome parade of facile mannerisms.
The collection formed by the Queen Mother is far more distinguished. Until now, it has been hidden from the public gaze at Clarence House, her London home from 1952 to 2002. But before Prince Charles moves in along with Camilla, William and Harry later this year, the main rooms on the ground floor have been opened to view for the first time. And we are now able to discover that the Queen Mother was a collector with a surprisingly contemporary edge.
Judging by Philip de Laszlo's portrait of the young Princess Elizabeth, painted in 1933, timidity dictated her mother's choice of an artist to paint her. Now almost forgotten, de Laszlo was immensely fashionable in society circles during the inter-war years. Flattering, adroit and glistening with highlights, de Laszlo's polished performance conveys no hint that his patron might soon pursue more audacious directions in 20th-century art.
The future Queen Mother's friendship with Kenneth Clark, the precocious director of the National Gallery and surveyor of the king's pictures, made her bolder. As well as being involved with painters of the past, Clark had a discerning eye for the best of his British contemporaries. He may well have encouraged her in 1943 to buy Paul Nash's incandescent Landscape of the Vernal Equinox.
As chairman of the war artists committee, Clark was responsible for sending Nash, along with Henry Moore, John Piper, Stanley Spencer and Graham Sutherland, to "record" aspects of the nation in conflict. And he suggested that Piper be commissioned to make a series of Windsor Castle views in case of war damage. The Queen Mother, who had just visited an exhibition of the Recording Britain project, proved very receptive to the idea. It must have chimed with her sense of history, and also appealed to her growing appetite for adventure in art.
Although Piper had abandoned his earlier involvement with abstraction, he still retained a sense of drama and vivacity. He produced observant studies of the diverse architectural styles found within the castle. Looking for unexpected vantages, he allowed the powerfully receding rooftop of the gothic chapel to give one picture its unsettling dynamism. His view of the Quadrangle possesses a similar urgency, as the ground rushes past crenellated battlements before meeting the robust Round Tower on its mound beyond. It looks doughty enough to repel enemy assault, yet the sky is alive with flickering intimations of a vicious storm. Such turbulence afflicts many of Piper's views of Windsor, and George VI remarked of the newly finished series that the artist seemed to have suffered "very bad luck with the weather".
As the pictures took a few years to complete, from 1941 to 1944, we can assume that Piper wanted the entire sequence to evoke baleful intimations of apocalypse. After all, Windsor was at risk from hostile attack throughout the war, and Piper's love of Britain's architectural richness would have made him particularly anxious about the possible obliteration of his country's history. Originally, the Windsor views were hung in a single room. Now they are hung in several places, a move that surely dissipates the collective impact they would once have had.
Not all the Queen Mother's wartime acquisitions were darkened by fears of catastrophe. In 1941, at a time when Walter Sickert's late paintings were widely regarded as products of a failing talent, she bought his Lady in a Pink Ballgown. Plenty of the artist's detractors would have derided the painting's lack of conventional finish. But its two figures, dressed so fancifully that they seem to have strayed from a commedia dell'arte production, are handled with even more vitality than Piper's Windsor sequence.
Sickert was at his most radical in these late canvases, and his other painting on view here, A Conversation Piece at Aintree, was turned down by the Queen Mother when first offered to her in 1939. It was also rejected by the Tate, Glasgow City Art Gallery and Victoria Art Gallery in Bath, where Sickert lived for many years - the conspicuous roughness of his summary brushwork evidently alienated even curators who were accustomed to the boldness of innovative art. By 1951, however, the Queen Mother had changed her mind about the painting. It was, after all, based on a photograph of King George V and his stud manager, Major F H W Featherstonehaugh. She did not mind, now, that Sickert gave both men a distinctly sinister air. Wearing black bowler hats rammed tightly around their brows and frowning conspiratorially, they look like dressed-up crooks plotting a devious crime, and probably gave the Queen Mother a great deal of private amusement.
I can imagine Noel Coward making irreverent comments about the more conservative aspects of her collection on his frequent visits to Clarence House. A jaunty little Caribbean canvas by Coward, Sortie de l'Eglise, JamaIque, hangs near a dull and deferential portrait of the Queen Mother by Sir Herbert James Gunn. I am sure that she preferred the quirkiness of Sutherland's portrait, even though it was rejected in the 1960s by the university authorities who had invited him to paint it. Propping up her head with a hand openly borrowed from Ingres, the Queen Mother in Sutherland's painting allows herself a wickedly knowing smile while blanched feathers cascade down from her hat. He catches the humour of a woman who may have secretly savoured the disapproval of philistine guests as they recoiled, with angry bewilderment, from her most daring and memorable purchases.
Clarence House, London SW1 is open to the public until 17 October. All tickets must be pre-booked (020 7766 7303)
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