Happy and glorious - 60 years of Majesty

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Sue Ward enjoys a ‘right Royal’ exhibition at Buckingham Palace

Visitors to Buckingham Palace this summer will be able to see a special exhibition commemorating the Queen’s Coronation. The largest exhibition ever mounted about the Coronation of Her Majesty opened at Buckingham Palace on Saturday, 27 July 2013. Celebrating the 60th anniversary of this historic event, it brings together an unprecedented array of the dresses, uniforms and robes worn on Coronation Day. Paintings recording the event, films and works of art and objects used by The Queen at the ceremony are also included, to help recreate the atmosphere of that extraordinary moment and the pageantry of a State occasion that has remained essentially unchanged for 1,000 years.

In the Palace’s Ballroom, the dresses, robes and uniforms worn by the principal royal party have been brought together for the first time since Coronation Day (2 June 1953). They include The Queen’s Coronation dress and Robe of Estate; the uniform, robe and coronet of The Duke of Edinburgh; the dress and robe of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother; the dress and robe of The Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret; and the outfits worn on the day by two-year-old Princess Anne and four-year-old Prince Charles.

I was most impressed by the Queen’s white satin Coronation dress, which was created by the British couturier Norman Hartnell (1901–79). The design incorporates an iconographic scheme of national and Commonwealth floral emblems in embroidered gold, silver and pastel-coloured silks, encrusted with pearls, crystals and sequins. Apparently, Hartnell also added a four-leaf clover to wish the Queen luck. You can also see Hartnell’s original designs for the dress and his embroidery samples.

The Queen’s Robe of Estate, worn when Her Majesty departed from Westminster Abbey for the Palace, is of English purple silk-velvet and is more than six and a half metres long from the shoulder to the tip of the train.

Exhibited with the Dress and Robe are a number of jewels worn by The Queen on Coronation Day. These include the George IV Diamond Diadem (made 1820), which Her Majesty wore for the journey from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey. The Diadem is one of the most recognizable of The Queen’s jewels, as she is shown wearing it on postage stamps and some issues of banknotes. Also on display are the diamond Coronation necklace and earrings, made for Queen Victoria in 1858 by R. & S. Garrard & Co. and worn by Her Majesty The Queen for her Coronation. These are serious diamonds!

As you tour the State Rooms, you can experience a sense of the atmosphere of Coronation Day and learn how individual rooms in the Palace were used in 1953. For example, it was in the Green Drawing Room that the photographer Cecil Beaton (1904–80) took his famous Coronation portraits of The Queen, using his signature theatrical backdrops to recreate the inside of Westminster Abbey. Other official portraits were taken in the Throne Room.

Along the visitor route are works of art and paintings linked to the occasion, including the Coronation Frieze (1960) by Feliks Topolski (1909–89), who was commissioned by The Duke of Edinburgh to record the colour and excitement of the event, and Queen Elizabeth II in Coronation Robes (1954), the State portrait by Sir Herbert James Gunn (1893–1964). It is always worth visiting the State Rooms at Buckingham Palace even when this exhibition is not on, just to see the collection of Royal paintings in the Picture Gallery: Rubens, Rembrandt, Poussin, Claude, Van Dyke to name a few, are represented here – it is truly an exciting collection.

So when you leave this truly memorable exhibition and sit in the café overlooking the famous Buckingham Palace lawn, and maybe enjoy a ‘royal’ ice cream made from cream from the royal herd at Windsor, I think you can imagine that 60 years ago the rooms you have just walked through would have been full of excitement, and expectation as to how this young Queen’s reign would evolve.