The royal treatment

Edward VII swept away the cobwebs of mid-Victorian style, Queen Mary had passion for all things small and the Queen Mother bought rather avant-garde art. In a forthcoming talk, Tim Knox, director of the Royal Collection, charts a century of regal taste

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IF history were to assign a nickname to Edward VII, it should perhaps be The Great Decorator. When he ascended the throne in 1901, after a long wait in the wings as Prince of Wales, he launched an interior revolution. 'He inherited palaces that had been decorated by his parents 50 years before or longer, places such as Osborne House, Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle, and went through them like a dose of salts,' says Tim Knox, director of the Royal Collection. 'He obliterated his parents' schemes quite intentionally.' Mr Knox, who this month is giving a talk—or 'a gallop', as he puts it—about royal patronage in the 20th century at the Royal Academy in London, mentions as an example the bedroom in which Prince Albert had died: 'It had been preserved in aspic by Queen Victoria: the King deliberately dismantled it.'