On display for the first time in more than 30 years, Queen Alexandra’s magnificent gold coronation dress is among more than 300 works from the Royal Collection that go on show at The King’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace from today (Friday, 11 April) in the new exhibition The Edwardians: Age of Elegance.
The exhibition explores the lavish lives and tastes of two of Britain’s most fashionable royal couples – King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, and King George V and Queen Mary – during a period of great opulence and profound change, as Europe edged ever closer towards war and Britain stood poised on the brink of the modern age.
Visitors will be immersed in the glamour and drama of the Edwardian era, with the exhibition’s free multimedia guide narrated by Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville.
After Queen Victoria’s 40 years of mourning, the coronation of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra was designed to be a public spectacle, heralding a glamorous new era for the royal family. Just three days before the ceremony, Edward required emergency surgery for appendicitis, delaying the event for six weeks.
When the coronation finally took place on 9 August 1902, it became one of the most sumptuous royal events in British history. The exhibition reunites for the first time an array of items commissioned and worn by the royal couple for the occasion.
Traditionally, a coronation dress would be a plain white or cream gown, inspired by ecclesiastical robes. However, Alexandra was a fashion trailblazer, known around the world for her style.
She chose a dramatic gold dress designed by the female-led Parisian fashion house Morin Blossier, sewn with thousands of tiny gold spangles designed to sparkle in the electric lights that had been installed in Westminster Abbey for the first time in honour of the occasion.
At Alexandra’s suggestion, the coronation dress became the first royal outfit to include the national emblems of Britain (rose, thistle and shamrock), a tradition continued on every subsequent coronation dress, including those of Queen Elizabeth II and Queen Camilla.
Forty needle-workers in Delhi spent five months embroidering the gown’s gold net, before it was sent to Paris to be laid over cloth of gold and made into the final gown. The rarely displayed dress is very fragile, and conservators have spent more than 100 hours preparing it for display.
Exhibition curator Kathryn Jones said: ‘While it has darkened over time, Alexandra’s choice of a shimmering gold fabric would have been incredibly striking at the coronation; there are descriptions in contemporary newspapers of moments in the ceremony where the Queen appears in an extraordinary blaze of golden light, the dress glowing in the new electric lighting.
“It’s a powerful example of Edward and Alexandra’s attempts to balance tradition and modernity as they stood on the cusp of the 20th century: a shining moment of glamour before the world was at war.’
Alexandra draped herself in jewels and pearls for the coronation, including a diamond necklace and earrings that were a wedding gift from Edward, on show for the first time, and the Dagmar necklace, a wedding gift from the King of Denmark. Also on display is her ostrich feather fan, its handle set with a diamond crown, an ‘A’ and the national emblems.
Alongside Alexandra’s ensemble, visitors will see Edward’s cloth-of-gold coronation mantle, the thrones commissioned for the occasion, and Edward and Alexandra’s state portraits by Sir Samuel Luke Fildes, measuring more than three metres high. Just like the dress, the thrones represented a break with royal tradition, having been commissioned from a French firm rather than British, reflecting Edward’s interest in French design.
On show for the first time is Alexandra’s copy of Sir Edward Elgar’s Coronation Ode for King Edward VII, acquired and signed by the Queen in 1902. It was the King who suggested to Elgar that words could be added to a section of his first Pomp and Circumstance March in honour of the coronation; he admired the tune and thought that it would make a good song. The resulting piece is known today as Land of Hope and Glory.
The Danish artist Laurits Tuxen was appointed as Alexandra’s ‘Special Artist to the Coronation’. On public display for the first time in over a century, his painting of the new Queen kneeling for the anointing captures both the magnificence and solemnity of the moment.
The exhibition features a further four paintings by Tuxen, including a never-before-seen depiction of the marriage of George and Mary in the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace. Over her customary black mourning clothes, George’s grandmother Queen Victoria can be seen wearing the white lace from her own wedding dress, worn in the same chapel 50 years earlier.
The Kokoshnik Tiara, which George’s mother Alexandra wears in the painting, is also on display.
The two royal couples surrounded themselves with fashionable society figures, their lives a whirlwind of garden parties, concerts and costume balls.
Visitors will see mementos from these events, ranging from a ‘Mary, Queen of Scots’ costume worn by Alexandra to a fancy-dress ball in 1871, to a pair of Tiffany & Co gold opera glasses studded with diamonds and pearls.
Meanwhile, large-scale portraits by the most fashionable society painters of the day, including Philip de László and John Singer Sargent, capture the era’s spectacular fashions.
As well as magnificent royal occasions, the exhibition explores the couples’ domestic lives. Displays evoke the cluttered interiors of their private residences, where decorative objects and photographs covered every surface.
Highlights include family snapshots taken by Alexandra on one of the earliest Kodak cameras, and pieces from the group of Fabergé animal sculptures commissioned by Edward in 1907: the single most important contribution to the royal collection of Fabergé and the largest order ever placed through the firm’s London branch.
All four figures collected works by the great contemporary artists of the period. Highlights from their private art collections include two luminous Frederic Leighton portraits, one of which was the first painting acquired by Edward aged just 17; Sir Edward Burne-Jones’s Study for a Head of Sleeping Beauty, displayed for the first time; a copy of Oscar Wilde’s Poems, on public display for the first time and featuring a rare hand-written message from the author; and Charles Baugniet’s atmospheric painting ‘After the Ball’, on view for the first time in over a century, which captures the elegance and exuberance of the era, with a society beauty asleep in her ballgown, having danced all night.