Tag: The Edwardians: Age of Elegance

Glamorous Edwardians to be explored in major Edinburgh exhibition

The Edwardians: Age of Elegance

The King’s Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse                         

24 April – 6 December 2026

A glamorous, never-before-exhibited portrait of Queen Mary and a miniature sleigh made of rock crystal will be among highlights on show in Scotland for the first time in a major exhibition opening this spring. 

The Edwardians: Age of Elegance will explore the glitzy world of two of Britain’s most fashionable royal couples – King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, and King George V and Queen Mary – through their family connections, royal events, global travels and art collecting.

The exhibition will open in Edinburgh following a successful run in London and is the first Royal Collection Trust exhibition to explore the Edwardian era. It will bring together more than 150 items including fashion, paintings and books, as well as personal items such as jewellery, photographs and chinaware, more than half of which are on show in Scotland for the first time. Visitors will see works from the Royal Collection by many of the period’s most celebrated names, including Fabergé, Tiffany & Co,and Edward Burne-Jones, and depictions of famous faces including composer Sir Edward Elgar.

Curator Kathryn Jones said: ‘The Edwardian era was a golden age of glamour and parties, but it was so much more than that; it was a fast-paced period making great advances in technology.

Our royal couples wanted to make the most of it all, living lavishly and embracing new trends, before the sobering arrival of war. Throughout, they were collecting art as a way to hold onto tradition and capture the rapidly changing world around them. We hope that visitors to the exhibition will enjoy stepping back in time to this exciting period.’

In 1863, Queen Victoria’s eldest son Albert Edward married Princess Alexandra of Denmark. The marriage of the fashionable young couple – the future King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra – initiated a glamorous new era for the royal family, with Queen Victoria still in mourning and away from public life. Edward and Alexandra established a new, vibrant court filled with opulent balls, society events and contemporary art – a lifestyle continued by their son, the future King George V, and his wife Queen Mary.

Full-length portraits of the two Queens will open the exhibition, showcasing the spectacular fashions of the era. The portraits of Queen Alexandra by François Flameng, and Queen Mary by William Samuel Henry Llewellyn (which has never before been on public display) will be shown alongside marble busts of their husbands, Kings Edward and George. Both couples were fond of Scotland, with Edward having studied at the University of Edinburgh and George and Mary making regular visits and devotedly modernising the Palace of Holyroodhouse to make it once again suitable for royal entertaining.

Displays will evoke the interiors of the royal couples’ private residences, Marlborough House and Sandringham House, where the Edwardian fashion of filling every cabinet and covering every surface with small decorative objects or family photographs reigned.

A star object on display for the first time in Scotland is a paperweight shaped like a tiny 10cm-tall sledge with a figure lying on it by Robert Colquhon. Thought to have been Scottish, Colquhon was agoldsmith based in Russia who made small-scale decorative objects from rock crystal and silver of snowy subjects like sleighs and bears on ice floes. Edward and Alexandra collected several of his works – with one of his sleighs appearing in a photograph of Alexandra’s desk in Marlborough House in the 1890s.

Visitors will also learn of the relationships linking the family to the rest of Europe. Fabergé was introduced to the British royal family through Alexandra’s sister Dagmar, who had married Alexander III, Tsar of Russia. The royal patronage caused the popularity of Fabergé to soar in the UK, and on show will be 21 items from the firm, including an ornate picture frame holding a photograph of Princess Louise, Duchess of Fife; a cigarette case famously given to Edward by his official mistress Mrs Keppel; and six miniature figures of the royal couple’s favourite animals on the Sandringham estate.

As enthusiastic patrons of the arts, the Edwardians embraced new artistic movements including Art Nouveau and Arts and Crafts, and the burgeoning medium of photography.

Alexandra was particularly taken with the drawings of the Pre-Raphaelite artist, Edward Burne-Jones, whose study for a larger painting inspired by Sleeping Beauty will be on display. A soft-focus photograph of Alexandrabyphotographer Alice Hughes was typical of her pioneering yet delicate style, and both are on display in Scotland for the first time.

Garden parties formed an essential part of the Edwardian social calendar, with the first taking place at the Palace of Holyroodhouse during the much-anticipated visit of George and Mary in 1911. Danish painter Laurits Tuxen had been introduced to Queen Victoria through her daughter-in-law Alexandra, and his painting of a garden party at Buckingham Palace captures the spirit of the joyous occasion.

Contributions to society were also celebrated through the founding of the Order of Merit in 1902 to recognise prominent figures in cultural, scientific or military life. George commissioned a portrait of each recipient – a tradition that continues to this day – and drawings of Sir Edward Elgar and the physicist Sir J.J. Thomson by Scottish artist William Strang will be on display for the first time in Scotland.

The turn of the century saw great improvements to methods of travel, and the Edwardian royals travelled further than any previous members of the royal family – collecting and receiving gifts as they went. In February 1901, George and Mary set sail for 10 months on HMS Ophir to open the new federal parliament in Melbourne, Australia. To mark the occasion, the ‘Ladies of Adelaide’ gave Mary a richly embroidered silk hanging featuring a eucalyptus tree and local varieties of irises and orchids. 

George and Mary visited the Palace of Holyroodhouse in July 1914, only a few weeks before the outbreak of the First World War. The glamour of the Edwardian era was being eclipsed by a serious atmosphere of duty – a sentiment led by the King, as Herbert Arnould Olivier’s study of King George V and Frank O. Salisbury’s painting The Passing of the Unknown Warrior, King George V as Chief Mourner, Whitehall attest. Collecting had now become a way to honour the many sacrifices made in the Great War; a more restrained and dutiful monarchy had emerged.

The King’s Gallery will continue to offer £1 tickets for visitors receiving Universal Credit and other named benefits. Other concessionary rates are available, including discounted tickets for Young People, half-price entry for children (with under-fives free), and the option to convert standard tickets bought directly from Royal Collection Trust into a 1-Year Pass for unlimited re-entry for 12 months.

Queen Alexandra’s trailblazing coronation dress on show as Edwardians exhibition opens at The King’s Gallery

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.