Watercolours and Drawings from the Collection of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother
Until September 25; The Queen’s Gallery, Edinburgh

It’s not the catchiest of exhibition titles, but Watercolours And Drawings From The Collection Of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother does exactly what it says on the tin. Although she spent nearly 100 years accumulating 1200 pictures, this is the first time an exhibition has been mounted from the late monarch’s collection.

You might expect to experience something like the tedium of Victoria and Albert’s watercolours, commissioned to document every step of their every journey. You might imagine that the Queen Mother would have continued in that tradition of staid, brown, heavily-worked souvenirs.

You would be wrong. There are, of course, the obligatory leafy landscapes and grey-stoned residences, but there are also some cracking surprises. The Queen Mother clearly had an eye for a picture, and particularly for a bright, cheerful play of colour. Lionel Bulmer’s watercolour, The Lamp, was hardly avant garde in the 1960s, but its flattened composition is a delight. Bottles and cups dance like skaters on an ice-rink table-top, their outlines traced as if in a cartoon.

In fact the Queen Mother appears to have been rather partial to cartoony styles, and certainly didn’t suffer from artistic snobbery. While waxy kids’ crayons and felt tipped pens still struggle to be taken seriously today, they were legitimate enough for her. A few actual cartoons are also on display, by Oscar Wilde’s contemporary, Max Beerbolm. His unflattering caricatures of King Edward VII caused public outrage in 1923, and despite the scandal, Queen Elizabeth (as she was then) was delighted to buy them in 1943.

In fact, Elizabeth took her role as patron of the arts most seriously during those years of the second world war. Having famously refused to move out of London during the Blitz, she made frequent visits to art exhibitions and charity auctions, buying works to cheer up the artists as well as her walls. Kenneth Clark, as Chairman of the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, did much to promote a lively generation of new artists to the receptive monarch.

Two beautiful colour woodcuts in the exhibition, by the Scottish artist Elizabeth Keith, are Japanese in style and content. It is indicative of the Queen Mother’s awareness of her public role that she bought the woodcuts, during a publicised visit to the artist’s show in 1937, when anti-Japanese feeling was running high. In that one move she resurrected the unfortunate artist’s career.

At a charity auction in 1943 The Queen Mother bought a stunning pastel drawing by war artist William Dring. If Degas were to have been a war artist aboard a naval vessel, he might have done something similar. The two sleeping sailors are arranged symmetrically on the near-vertical wooden boards like off-duty ballet dancers.

A less adventurous group of drawings hangs nearby, its significance more historical than artistic. Afraid that Windsor Castle might not survive the war, the Queen Mother commissioned architectural draughtsman, John Piper, to record the building from every possible angle. What was not in the brief was the stormy black weather which the artist controversially inserted into every single scene, dismissing the queen’s optimistic request that he might “try a spring day”.

This collection of pictures is in tune with the Queen Mother as she has been portrayed to us. Rooted in tradition, there is a strong moral backbone, and a love of fun and colour. Even the most war-torn buildings are pleasing to the eye, and uplifting to the spirits. But never, never does it stray beyond the bounds of propriety. How perfectly appropriate.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 03.04.05