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only likes animal pictures, although some of her favourite paintings which hang in the
private dining-room and the corridor at Windsor do include, among views of Rome and
Venice by Canaletto, a set of Stubbs painted for George IV, and over her bed at
Sandringham hangs the only known antique painting of a corgi. According to a former
Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures:
She’s enormously proud of her pictures and takes very seriously her role as custodian of the royal collection.
She has an exceedingly penetrating eye – an inherited asset – and her assessment of a picture is invariably
honest and often shrewd. She has a good visual memory. She will never pretend to appreciate something she
doesn’t like or understand – and here she’s often over-modest. I think she is very moved by a good painter of
certain kinds of pictures. When we were hanging pictures for her in the private dining-room at Buckingham
Palace, she picked out from the Picture Gallery some of the finest, most appealing Dutch, Flemish and
English paintings.
Elizabeth likes to look at pictures by herself, but is rarely given the chance to do so at
public exhibitions where her private enjoyment is often spoiled by the intrusive remarks
of a well-meaning curator or trustee. ‘I remember one exhibition in particular – of
Stubbs at the Tate – she knew a great deal about him and I could see this person
interposing himself ruining it for her. All she wanted was to look at the pictures and
occasionally remark what she liked, and I could see this experience was actually
unenjoyable for her,’ a friend said.
The size and quality of the Queen’s collection is of vast importance. It contains more
than 7,000 paintings as compared with the 2,000 or so owned by the National Gallery,
3,000 miniatures (the largest collection in existence), 30,000 Old Master drawings and
watercolours (including a bird’s-eye view of Tuscany by Leonardo da Vinci), 500,000
engravings and etchings, thousands of works of art and the world’s greatest collection of
Sèvres porcelain. Like most of the Queen’s possessions, the royal collections are
controversial. Although collected by her ancestors, they are not her personal property;
and although often included among her assets, they are hardly that in real terms since
she cannot sell them.
Estimates of Elizabeth’s wealth vary wildly from the billions that used to be reached
by lumping together all the palaces and their contents, the private estates, the Crown
Jewels and the Crown Jewellery (pieces worn by the Queen on state occasions). Again
the jewellery is a grey area when it comes to assets; although the Crown Jewels are
obviously inalienable and the Crown Jewellery assumed to be so, a good many of the
other jewels are almost certainly family property, acquired with private funds. A recent
report, which excluded the palaces and royal collections, estimated her private wealth at
£1.15 billion, a figure which was achieved by including investments (put at £500
million), the Duchy of Lancaster (£204 million), art and stamp collections, jewels,
private property such as Sandringham and Balmoral, gifts totalling £50 million, vintage
cars, racehorses, wine, medals and furs. 5 Yet the figures given for Elizabeth’s
investments can only be guesstimates; in 1993 the then Lord Chamberlain stated that
the Queen’s cash fortune was less than £100 million. Since her investments are divided