Elizabeth II spent virtually all her life surrounded by one of the world’s greatest art collections. Even when she was a child, and the likelihood of her inheriting the throne still seemed remote, visits to her grandparents at Buckingham Palace involved looking at pictures, since George V enjoyed showing her the Victorian narrative paintings that hung there, such as William Powell Frith’s ‘Ramsgate Sands’.

Nobody knows exactly how many works of art there are in the Royal Collection, but at the end of Elizabeth II’s reign nearly 300,000 objects had been catalogued online, probably just under a third of the whole. Among the many masterpieces are Andrea Mantegna’s monumental sequence of canvases ‘The Triumph of Caesar’, purchased by Charles I in 1629; nearly 600 drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, including virtually all his anatomical studies; one of the finest Mughal manuscripts, ‘Padshahnama’; no fewer than 52 paintings by Canaletto; and the largest collection of 18th-century Sèvres porcelain outside France.

The existence of this extraordinary collection is evidence of the longevity of the British monarchy: in most countries, royal collections now form the core of national galleries – the Prado in Spain and the Louvre in France, for example – whereas in Britain these works are distributed over 15 royal residences and former residences. Although the collection was occasionally included in estimates of the Queen’s personal wealth, it is a possession of the Crown and so – like Buckingham Palace – cannot be sold.

It is one of the ironies of the Queen’s life that this vast accumulation was the backdrop to the ceremonial and domestic life of a woman who was supposedly indifferent to art. Anyone who asks a member of the royal household what the Queen thought about the subject is likely to be told the anecdote that when Christopher Lloyd, who was Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures from 1988 to 2005, raised the idea that she might spend money on contemporary art, she looked surprised and replied: ‘But what about my horses?’ (It seems unlikely that he was cheeky enough to answer, as reported: ‘Well they never win, do they?’) Unlike her husband and eldest son she never painted or sketched; unlike her mother, she made almost no attempt to buy modern pictures for her own pleasure; and unlike Prince Philip, whose enjoyment of the company of such painters as Edward Seago and Feliks Topolski encouraged him to accumulate a large private collection, she had no artists among her friends.

Although the fact that some 5,500 objects in the Royal Collection were acquired by Elizabeth II sounds impressive (the figure for one of the greatest of all royal collectors, George IV, is 5,049), the overwhelming majority are gifts of very variable merit made to the Queen in the course of royal tours or state visits. On the advice of curators she purchased significant works with a royal provenance, such as Jacobite portraits, that for historic reasons had not formed part of the collection, but one searches largely in vain for anything that might reveal personal taste or enthusiasms.

Yet, as so often with Elizabeth II, an appearance of simplicity concealed something more complex. In her fictional encounter with Anthony Blunt – Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures from 1945 to 1973 – in Alan Bennett’s well-informed 1988 play A Question of Attribution, she says of the Royal Collection: ‘What I don’t like is the assumption that one doesn’t notice, one doesn’t care.’ The Queen, as those who worked with her soon came to realise, sometimes to their cost, possessed that most valuable asset for a monarch, an excellent memory. She paid careful attention to the collection and could often recall with greater precision than her curators where a picture now hung and where it had hung in the past.

Although her education, which involved visits with Queen Mary to the National Gallery and Wallace Collection, taught her a good outline knowledge of art history rather than an appreciation of art for its own sake, she demonstrated impressive visual recall when only 11. Shown the Gold State Coach that would take her parents to the coronation in 1937, she remarked that its decorative paintings by Cipriani reminded her of the ceiling of the drawing-room in the Mountbattens’ house, Broadlands, which are indeed in his style, although now usually attributed to Angelica Kauffman.

The paintings that most appealed to the Queen in the Royal Collection were not necessarily of horses. When once asked if she had a favourite picture, she pointed to Rembrandt’s ‘The Shipbuilder and his Wife’, which hangs in the Picture Gallery at Buckingham Palace, a work that would be on any list of the collection’s most lovable pictures, as well as being one of its outstanding masterpieces. The Dutch pictures – a passion of George IV – and the British seem to have been closest to her heart: most of the paintings in the smaller rooms of her private apartment at Buckingham Palace were Dutch, whereas her private reception rooms were hung with British pictures, notably by Gainsborough and Stubbs. Yet it would probably be unwise to read too much into this since the choice of paintings in these rooms had changed very little since they were rehung by Edward VII after the death of Queen Victoria in 1901.

It would not be entirely unfair to say that, despite the numerous acquisitions made by Queen Mary in particular, at the end of the Queen’s reign the Royal Collection was largely frozen in the state that it had been a century earlier. There are many reasons for that, only some of which are reflections on the fact that the Queen did not collect art. She inherited the throne when only 25, too young to have formed many enthusiasms of her own, and her tastes remained close to those of her father, whom she revered and who was not known for a love of art. That was not the case with the Queen Mother or Princess Margaret, but they enjoyed teasing the Queen about her supposed philistinism, which was not an encouragement for her to develop an interest in the subject.

The half-century before her accession, dominated by two world wars, had not been propitious for collecting, and by the 1950s the aristocratic circles closest to the royal family were more likely to be sellers than purchasers of works of art. In the 1960s the art market entered its long boom and for the Queen to have regularly bought works of art of sufficient quality for the Royal Collection would have required expenditure on a level that would have been impossible even if she had been less frugal by nature.

Soon after the second world war, the Queen Mother bought a painting by Claude Monet for herself. Knowing how much pleasure it gave her, the Queen attempted in 1957 to buy her as a birthday present Monet’s
‘The Blue House at Zaandam’ when it was sold at Sotheby’s as part of the Weinberg Collection, only to be vastly outbid when it fetched £22,000, the equivalent at today’s prices of around £500,000.

Prince Philip believed that the royal family could do more to support contemporary artists, and when he visited a selling exhibition he would usually buy a painting. In 1960 one of the guest suites at Windsor Castle was due to be refurbished and he suggested that it should be decorated in a modern style and furnished with contemporary works of art. To encourage his wife to take an interest, a shortlist of paintings and drawings, chosen under Blunt’s supervision, was shown to the Queen so that she could make the final choice. The result was impressive – works by Barbara Hepworth, Ivon Hitchens, Sidney Nolan and Mary Fedden, among others, were acquired – but the experiment was not repeated.

Most of the Queen’s encounters with contemporary artists were the result of her sitting for portraits, beginning with a miniature painted by Mabel Hankey of Princess Elizabeth at the age of three. Given the number of portraits that were produced over the following century, the results are disappointingly unmemorable, a result largely of the gulf that had opened up between the concerns of most contemporary artists and those of the monarchy. Among the few that have more than documentary value are the two portraits by Pietro Annigoni, painted in 1955 and 1969, and a handful of commissioned photographs, notably by Cecil Beaton. The best-known portrait by a leading modern artist is Lucian Freud’s, painted in 2001. The Queen struggled to conceal her dislike of it: ‘At least he didn’t make me pose in the nude,’ she said in answer to a friend’s disparaging comment.

One portrait likely to endure is the screen print made by Andy Warhol in 1985 for his ‘Reigning Queens’ portfolio, which is based on an official photograph taken by Peter Grugeon for the Silver Jubilee in 1977. The significance of Warhol’s work was recognised by the Queen when in 2012 she purchased the ‘Royal Edition’ of the portfolio (embellished with diamond dust) for the Royal Collection. Warhol was attracted to her as a subject partly because of his interest in replication: in 1978 he bought for his own collection two copies by Allan Ramsay of his state portraits of George III and Queen Charlotte. For once in the Queen’s long reign, the priorities of monarchy and a major artist had coincided with fruitful results.