(3 of 4)
The best thing in the Throne Room is its ceiling by Nash. In fact the best thing about the whole palace, architecturally speaking, is Nash's ceilings. This is just as well, since the floors are unspeakable. The Aubusson carpets have been rolled up and put away -- you can't have twice 5,000 feet shuffling across those every day for two months. In their place are hundreds of yards of new Axminster in industrial-strength reds, which clash strenuously with the green or blue silk on the walls; it looks as though the House of Windsor got a discount deal on something left over from Jean Bedel Bokassa's coronation. Don't look down; look up. Nash may have been a spendthrift with his sovereign's sovereigns, but he certainly knew about stucco, and could bring it to incredible heights of airiness, complexity and rich detail. Even the gold leaf on every inch of the coffering and diaper work fails to make these vaults seem congested.
In between the floors and the ceiling, what? Walls and pictures, and some furniture. Much of the furniture has been moved out for the sake of traffic flow -- there is no dining table in the State Dining Room, for instance, which seems a pity. Things that go along the walls, like sofas and a few exquisite desks and console tables by two 18th century French ebenistes, Riesener and Weisweiler, remain; in furniture, the tastes of George IV and William IV ran more to Paris than to London. There are also some 1960s vintage electric heaters sitting in the fireplaces, just as they do in every bed-sitter in the realm, a homely touch that suggests both the impossibility of heating Buck House and EIIR's bond with her subjects.
The state rooms contain only a tiny fraction of the immense Royal Collection (10,000 pictures, they say, with 30,000 drawings and half a million prints), better sampled in the galleries outside the palace that are always open to the public and have no queues. Buckingham Palace does contain some great pictures though. Most are from the Netherlands: Rembrandt's ship $ builder, with his sketches of hull sections before him, being handed a note by his stout wife; top-flight Rubenses; and Van Dyck's two portraits of Charles I, especially the "greate peece," which depicts him with his consort and children -- the mobile thin face, shadowed with melancholy, amid the grand, vaporous profusion of light on silk and marble. No later court painter -- at least not in England -- would rival Van Dyck's poetic conception of kingship. From there it is downhill to Winterhalter, though Americans will be interested to see their very own Benjamin West, the wunderkind from the colonies and George III's favorite artist, doing a full length of the monarch with Redcoats in the background in 1779. No Yankee rebel, he. The main lesson here about British royal taste is how fast it died after 1830. It would have done better with Mad King Ludwig than with Good Prince Albert.