The other royal collection: Windsors’ multimillion-pound private trove of art may include official gifts

Prince Philip was accompanying Queen Elizabeth II on an official visit to Denmark when the venerated modernist painter Marc Chagall pressed a gift into his hands. It was 1960 and the pair had just met at a ceremony where Chagall was presented with the prestigious Erasmus prize. Philip would later recall the artist’s “jocular attitude” as he showed him around his exhibition.

“He gave me this Bible he has illustrated, just out of the blue. He was a very strange man,” Philip reportedly said. It was also something of a strange gift. Inside the Bible, Chagall had daubed colourful illustrations in watercolours, chalk and ink. Those two illustrations could now be worth as much as £60,000.

As contemporary artworks go, that is not a huge sum. However, the Chagall Bible is one of an extraordinary collection of almost 400 artworks, some worth much more, that have been exhibited by the Windsors in “personal” or “private” collections.

They are, in total, likely to be worth tens of millions of pounds, possibly more, and include pieces by Salvador Dalí, LS Lowry, Claude Monet and Lucian Freud.

Many of the items, however, raise questions for the Windsors about whether all of these artworks should really belong to them.

Royal art can broadly be separated into two categories. Most of it is part of the royal collection, more than a million items that are held in trust by the sovereign for the benefit of the nation. Described as one of the greatest art collections in the world, it is the nearest the UK has to a public custodian of royal-linked art.

The second, much more elusive category is that which the royals treat as their own: the Windsors’ private collection. There is no public register of these works and Buckingham Palace refuses to comment in any detail on what it regards as private wealth. However, items such as the Chagall Bible raise questions about what falls under that definition.

Not in the royal collection, the artwork casually given to Philip on a state visit appears to have been absorbed into his own collection. At a special exhibition in Holyrood Palace in 1994, the Chagall piece was on display as part of the prince’s “personal collection”.

Buckingham Palace’s gift policy, introduced the following year, distinguishes between “official gifts”, which are generally those received in the course of formal duties and functions, and “personal gifts”, from people whom members of the royal family know personally. The policy adds: “In all cases, and particularly on official overseas trips, organisations and individuals should be discouraged from offering extravagant gifts, ie gifts of high monetary value.”

Contacted by the Guardian, the palace declined to comment on the ownership status of the Chagall or more than a dozen other artworks that would appear to have been official gifts but have been exhibited as part of the Windsors’ personal or private collections. “It is incorrect to suggest that the artworks you list were all official gifts,” a spokesperson said. “We would not comment on the value of works of art.”

A Monet worth millions

A watercolour artist himself, King Charles III is an aficionado of fine art. The four floors of his London residence, Clarence House, are filled with artwork, much of which is unequivocally the private property of the Windsors.

Charles can largely thank his grandmother for the art adorning the walls of Clarence House. An avid private collector, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother bought dozens of valuable artworks between the 1930s and 1950s, when prices were lower because of the war, and bargains could be found in the frequent country house sales of the time.

Over the years, the queen mother filled Clarence House, then her London residence, with a collection worthy of any great gallery, although its presentation was more homely.

In the corner of the Morning Room, behind a side table covered with family photographs and the shade of a table lamp, hangs what is probably the most valuable of all the art in the royals’ private collection: Claude Monet’s Study of Rocks; Creuse: Le Bloc. The painting was bought by the queen mother in 1945, at the Wildenstein gallery in Paris. The second world war had dampened art prices and she snapped it up for £2,000, the equivalent of £110,000 today.

Susan Orringe, of Prestige Valuations, told the Guardian the painting could fetch up to £20m if it were sold today. However, she clarified that the estimated price was highly speculative and the paucity of Monets on the market, coupled with the fact that it had hung for decades in the queen mother’s front room, could raise its value much higher.

Clarence House, which used to be open to the public, has been closed since 2019. The Monet and other artworks can be seen in a virtual tour of the residence.

The artworks also include Fylde Farm by LS Lowry, worth about £120,000, and a portrait of George Bernard Shaw by Augustus John, worth about £70,000. Elsewhere in the house are multiple other works, including paintings by Paul Nash, Raffaellino del Garbo and Alfred Sisley. The Eve of St Agnes by John Everett Millais, which the queen mother bought at auction in 1942 for £630, could be worth about £1.5m today.

Charles moved into Clarence House in 2003, after the death of the queen mother the previous year. He has previously said that among his favourite works are a moody series of paintings of Windsor Castle by John Piper. They hang on the wall of his dining room. The queen mother paid £10 each for them (equivalent to £646 in today’s money). Today the set could be worth £150,000.

It is assumed Charles has inherited almost all of the artwork previously owned by the queen mother, the queen and Prince Philip. As monarch, he is exempt from the inheritance tax that would be due on any high-value bequests to his siblings.

However, it is impossible to know precisely who owns which pieces in the Windsors’ private collection, and how much it may all be worth.

The Guardian consulted experts on the value of 60 of the most significant works on a list of 392 identified as being privately owned by the Windsors. The total value of the 60 was estimated to be at least £24m. But that valuation is based on only a fraction of a much larger collection.

In 2020, the historian David McClure estimated that the queen mother’s private collection, said to have comprised 1,200 prints, paintings and drawings, was worth £30m. He concluded that Prince Philip’s collection, said to include more than 1,500 items, was worth £2m. In 2001, the art expert Robin Simon valued the queen’s collection for the Mail on Sunday and concluded it was worth £150m (the equivalent of £261m today).

That would suggest the Windsors’ private collection could be worth more than £290m. However, the lack of any public register of these works means all of these estimates are speculative. It is impossible to say anything with certainty about the value of the private art collection, although there is no doubt it is worth many millions of pounds.

Dalí and Freud

The value of the private collection matters because while much of the Windsors’ private art is unequivocally theirs, some of it might be better described as belonging to the nation. The royal policy on accepting gifts states that items presented on official duties, by people not considered close personal friends, “are not the private property of the member of the royal family who receives them”.

More than a third of the 392 pieces identified by the Guardian in private royal collections appear to have been gifts of one sort or another. Some were wedding presents, while others were official gifts on overseas trips, including from artists themselves. All were displayed in exhibitions of “personal” art collections. None are part of the public royal collection.

One such instance was a gift from the Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí, whom Philip met in 1972 while staying near Avignon on a state visit to the south of France. Not much is known about that meeting, but at some point Dalí presented Philip with an etching called Hommage, as well as a special edition of his book adorned with sketches in ballpoint pen.

Those gifts could be worth in the region of £10,000 today. Philip included them in an exhibition of work described as his personal collection in 1994.

An infamous portrait of Queen Elizabeth II by Lucian Freud is another example of a direct gift from an artist. The 2001 work divided opinion, prompting the Sun’s royal photographer Arthur Edwards to declare: “Freud should be locked in the Tower [of London] for this.”

But it would appear that the queen liked it enough to adopt it as part of her personal collection. The small oil painting has now passed into the possession of the king, who loaned it to a Freud exhibition late last year.

The painting joins another by Freud, Small Fern, which was given to Charles for his 50th birthday in 1998 and exhibited as one of his privately owned works in 2018. Oils by Freud are considered extremely valuable; Orringe estimated the botanical painting could fetch up to £600,000.

Other artworks given to the royals on state visits include a watercolour of an Australian bird by Carol O’Connor, presented to Philip on an official visit to Perth in 1990; an acrylic on masonite of pelicans by Robert Bateman, given to Philip in 1987 to mark 100 years of national parks in Canada; both were exhibited as part of Prince Philip’s “personal collection”. A watercolour painting by Charles Decimus Barraud, given to the queen mother by the mayor of Auckland, New Zealand, in 1958 was included in a list of her collection, which passed to the queen on her death.

In their statement, the palace spokesperson did not shed any light on whether specific artworks exhibited in private collections were regarded as official or personal gifts.

“Official gifts are not the personal property of the member of the royal family who receives them, but may be held by the sovereign in right of the crown or designated in due course as part of the royal collection,” they said. “Even when works of art are privately held by members of the royal family, they are frequently lent to public exhibitions.”

The palace declined to say why none of the artworks were contained in the royal collection.

Haggling over prices

The royal collection contains 5,600 paintings, including works by Mantegna, Rubens, Rembrandt and Canaletto. The royals have the privilege of borrowing items in the collection free of charge to hang in their private residences, while others appear in Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace.

But Philip, who married into the monarchy with very little wealth of his own, was said to have found the art of the royal collection stuffy. Unimpressed, he began to collect more contemporary artists, perhaps drawing on his wife’s funds to do so.

“We could have borrowed, of course,” he said in a 1994 interview with the Scotsman, “but I thought it would be more fun to have our own.”

Of the 392 works identified by the Guardian, 80 were bought privately by either Philip or the queen mother – and are, in that sense, indisputably theirs.

Philip, in particular, liked a bargain, boasting of his James Morrison oil paintings: “I bought them, I don’t know, for £1,000 or something. I don’t know what he charges now, about £30,000 or something.” (The record price for a Morrison was set in 2014 at £81,000.)

Letters between Philip and Feliks Topolski, a Polish-born artist whom he considered a friend, show Philip haggling over the price of an equestrian portrait for two years. He eventually drove down the price and got the work for £834 – the equivalent of £12,000 in today’s money. This was a 63% discount on what experts had told him it should be worth.

Philip and the queen mother are known to have taken advantage of trips to the Commonwealth to add to their private collections, which, for example, contain 27 works by Australian and Indigenous artists.

The most valuable of those is Home Leave by Russell Drysdale, which was acquired by the queen mother and is now worth an estimated £1.7m. Philip bought works by Sidney Nolan and was given two paintings by William Dobell, which together are now worth in the region of £570,000.

Jane Raffan, an Australian art expert and valuer, said that in the 1950s and 60s royal visitors behaved like “upper-level tourists in that they were looking to acquire something, a souvenir from their trip, but they were not buying something from a tourist tat shop … in many ways it was a case of right time and place in regard to the Dobells, the Nolans and the Drysdales.”

‘I cannot resist it’

Another blurred line around the Windsors’ private collection relates to works produced by artists who accompany them on official tours. Philip befriended Edward Seago over the years and the Norfolk-based artist gave him and the queen mother many paintings. Sixty of those came from a trip Seago took with Philip on the Royal Yacht Britannia, when, after a state visit to Australia in 1956, they sailed on to the Antarctic.

“He painted all these pictures and said: ‘You can have them’,” Philip told the Scotsman newspaper. While the two men were friends at that point, the paintings were made and presented as part of an official royal trip. Yet none of them are in the royal collection. The trove of oils passed to the royals by Seago could now be worth as much as £2.6m.

Charles has also been known to take artists on royal tours overseas; a palace spokesperson stressed they were “personally funded” by him. Artists including John Ward, Susannah Fiennes, Robbie Wraith and Warwick Fuller accompanied Charles, when he was Prince of Wales, to various destinations, from Oman to South Africa.

In 1989, Charles explicitly said that the practice of taking artists with him overseas would benefit the public collection of art held in trust for the benefit of the nation. “It is such a good way of providing a record, adding to the royal collection, obtaining some tips on painting, and meeting other artists, that I cannot resist it,” he said.

The Guardian has identified 25 pieces produced by artists on such foreign trips. None are in the royal collection. They have, presumably, been incorporated into the king’s private assets. Buckingham Palace declined to say where they were being kept, or why they were not in the royal collection. The locations of the works given to the royal family by Dalí, Chagall and Freud also remain a mystery.

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