The Edwardians: Age of Elegance: Opulence, glamour and psychological depth

Telegraph

10-04-2025

A banner above this exhibition's threshold promises ' the opulence and glamour of the Edwardian age '. With so many sumptuous objects among its 319 exhibits – including a brooch with emeralds thicker than my thumb, and a fan with a poor hummingbird set, like fruit upon plate, within a disc of fluffy white feathers – there's plenty of the former, and quite a bit of the latter (despite some bygone ceremonial stuffiness). But visitors expecting an escapist, Downton Abbey-style romp set squarely during the reign of Edward VII should know that the scope is, in fact, considerably wider.
The exhibition begins in 1863 with the marriage of Edward, then still Prince of Wales, to Alexandra, a young Danish princess, and Britain's future queen; it ends almost 60 years later, having considered the collecting habits of their second son, George V, and his consort, Mary, the daughter of a German nobleman. By this point, the Great War (addressed, here, in a small, sombre final gallery) had shattered the way of life of the 'ancien régime'. So, a lot of sparkle to savour, but some sadness, too.
With Queen Victoria in mourning, following Prince Albert's death in 1861, and away from the public eye, Edward and Alexandra dominated society as arbiters of fashion at the apex of the so-called 'Marlborough House set'.
A teeming opening gallery presents, against vivid green walls, some of the cornucopia of objects that they (and, later, George and Mary) amassed, including paintings by Frederic Leighton and Lawrence Alma-Tadema, pictures of animals such as Rosa Bonheur's majestic profile of a lion, and bountiful high-end trinkets: ornate candelabra and hand-mirrors, cigarette cases and snuffboxes, and stunning Cartier 'objets de luxe', including a snazzy purple desk clock, from 1911, and a smoky-quartz pencil case. At points, the effect is like that of a treasury, with riches arranged by type (Danish porcelain, Russian art, silver drinking horns and tankards, and so on). If this represents a 'cluttered' aesthetic, as a label suggests, it is clutter of the most glittering, magpie-enticing kind.
Just, though, when you thought that things couldn't get any grander, the crimson-walled second gallery, devoted to 'Court Life', switches attention to state occasions such as the Coronation of 1902, rigidly recorded, with finicky verisimilitude, by the Danish painter Laurits Tuxen. (A third section examines the royal protagonists' wider engagement with the British Empire and elsewhere, and reflects a nation considerably more self-confident than today.)
A wall of vast paintings makes plain how tricky royal portraiture can be. Thanks, in part, to a gorget-like diamond necklace by Cartier, which obscures her throat and thus separates her body, Queen Alexandra's head, in François Flameng's 1908 likeness, appears like a disembodied apparition floating above a white miasma (intended to evoke the gauze of her gown). Nearby, William Samuel Henry Llewellyn's official state portrait imbues Queen Mary with the vigour of a mannequin.
In between these two works, a silky, sensuous portrait by John Singer Sargent of Louise, Duchess of Connaught (the wife of Arthur, Edward's younger brother) provides its sitter with a complex facial expression that suggests psychological depth. This, it seems to whisper, is how flattering portraiture should be done.