What a gathering the Danish artist Lauren Tuxen gave us in his picture of the family of Queen Victoria in 1887 in the Green Drawing Room at Windsor. It was packed with her children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, lots of them crowned heads. At the centre was the old Queen, the future Edward VII nearby, his son Albert Victor, who was to die a few years later, and his second son George, who inherited both the throne and his brother’s fiancée. Looking away, there was Wilhelm, later Kaiser, tactfully at a distance from the Princess of Wales (Germany had invaded her native Denmark). Much of the history that followed is summed up in this great picture which opens the exhibition.
Edward gave his name not just to a period but an atmosphere. “Edwardian” conjures up something very different from “Victorian”: the world of The Wind in the Willows, EM Forster, picture hats and boaters and the long golden summer that came to an end in August 1914. We find here a picture of a royal garden party at Buckingham Palace that summed up that atmosphere of serene self confidence and deference, with Victoria in a carriage with Alexandra; the bearing of the gentlemen ushers was stately and poised. At the front, the little boy in a sailor suit was the future Edward VIII.
