Queen’s Gallery, London
There’s an entire wall of Rembrandts in here, not to mention magnificent works by Vermeer and Rubens. But these treasures should be on show to everyone all the time
Some of the greatest paintings in Britain – and I mean works by the likes of Rembrandt, Vermeer and Rubens – all hang in a single room, namely the Picture Gallery of Buckingham Palace. It must be quite something to visit, the kind of royal sanctum many of us only see via The Crown on Netflix. Except we don’t – because, obviously, they weren’t allowed to film there. (Everyone notices their own clangers on the show: I stopped watching when Anthony Blunt, surveyor of the Queen’s pictures and a Soviet spy, explained art – and this collection – to HM using the term “early modern”. This old school art snob would no more have said “early modern” than he’d have said “taken to Twitter”. He’d have said “renaissance” or “baroque”.)
The Picture Gallery is having works done so its paintings are being shown at the Queen’s Gallery next door. So here they are, those early modern masterpieces, in a stunning revelation of the Royal Collection’s finest canvases. There is an entire wall of Rembrandts, each astonishing, some rarely seen out and about. I’ve never before looked into the eyes of Rembrandt’s rabbi. Always curious about his Jewish neighbours when he lived on Amsterdam’s Breestraat, the artist homes in on an old scholar’s anxious expression.