The story
Tucked against one side of Buckingham Palace is the part of the royal residence built specifically to show art to the public. It opened in 1962 on the site of a private chapel destroyed in the Blitz, and it puts a changing selection of the Royal Collection on view, one of the largest art collections in the world, spread across many royal houses and mostly closed to visitors.
Because the walls are rehung for each exhibition, what you see depends on the season, whether it is Leonardo's drawings, Canaletto's Venice or Vermeer's Music Lesson, a quiet scene of a woman at a keyboard that is among the finest pictures the monarch owns. Fabergé, armour, furniture and royal portraits come and go the same way.
Long known as the Queen's Gallery, it was renamed the King's Gallery under Charles III in 2024.
