Victoria and Albert at Buckingham Palace

Frederic Leighton’s ‘Cimabue’s Madonna Carried in the Procession’ (1853-55)

No monarch in British history embodied the taste of an era more definitively than Queen Victoria. Her Georgian predecessors were extravagant and flighty; Victoria, by contrast, was solid and cautious, bourgeois both in her pleasure in family life and in encouraging a pictorial art that celebrated it.

Living within their means, she and her husband Prince Albert could rarely afford to add to the great royal holdings of Old Masters, but they engaged vividly with the artists of their day. Each birthday, anniversary and Christmas through their 20-year marriage, they exchanged paintings and sculptures, building an extraordinarily personal and coherent collection.

Victoria & Albert: Art & Love, opening next week at the Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace, recreates the ornamental, crowded rooms of the couple’s residences at Osborne House, Balmoral and Windsor to tell its story – aesthetic, psychological, financial, cultural – for the first time.

Nothing if not confident, the royal couple were still in their twenties when they commissioned the life-size marble sculptures – Prince Albert by the Prussian Emil Wolff, Queen Victoria by John Gibson, a pupil of Canova – that frame the entrance here. Albert as Greek warrior looks steadfast and responsible; an emblem of Victory (Victoria) on his breastplate identifies him as the Queen’s champion. The likeness of Victoria, who was under 5ft tall but demanded acute naturalism as well as neo-classical gravitas, was more problematic. Gibson fretted over how “to preserve in a small figure that look and air of one presiding over us – that air of dignity and firmness, yet softened by a touch of mildness and grace which her Majesty really has”.

The earnest, anachronistic result looks absurd to contemporary eyes. Yet the work highlights the “peculiar sincerity” that Lytton Strachey singled out as the queen’s chief characteristic. This made her at once impressive and ridiculous, charming and tyrannical, and shaped her love of the high realism that dominates this show.

Victoria thought animal painter Edwin Landseer “the cleverest artist there is” – his portrait of Eos commemorates a beloved greyhound, alert, keen and “always proud and contemptuous of other dogs”. Court favourite was academic pompier Franz Xaver Winterhalter, whose monumental, mock-informal depictions such as “The Royal Family in 1846” still fix our idealised image of 19th-century domesticity. Winterhalter is fluent and glossy, but Victoria’s trust in him, after a first Van Dyck-style official portrait in a froth of lace, gave him insights that make his chronicle of courtly life a historian’s dream.

His “secret picture”, prepared for Albert’s 24th birthday and commissioned for £105, shows Victoria with wide eyes, colour rising, in frankly alluring pose, reclining on a red cushion, shoulders bare, hair tumbling down, as if urging her husband to join her in bed. “Queen Victoria with Prince Arthur”, in which she nurses her seventh child on the seaside terrace at Osborne, was another birthday gift and another act of complicity. Contrasted with a giant spiky agave plant, mother and baby wrapped together in soft silks and muslins are an embattled unit against the world – expressing a relationship unlike that between Victoria and her other children. “This child is dear, dearer than any of the others put together,” she admitted.

A year later, in 1851, “dear Albert with his wonderful knowledge and taste gave W. the idea” – and £500 – for a stagy “Adoration” scene, “The First of May”. Here Victoria is recast as a Madonna – her diadem a halo – holding up Arthur on his first birthday to receive a casket from his godfather the Duke of Wellington. Albert stands behind, surveying his showpiece, the Crystal Palace, at the opening of the Great Exhibition. At 21, Arthur inquired after the casket, to be told it did not exist: “dear Papa and Winterhalter wished it to represent an Event, like Rubens and Paul Veronese ... it only shows how wrong in fact it is not to paint things as they really are.”

The development of 19th-century painting turned, of course, on arguments about representing “things as they really are” – Courbet’s muscular naturalism, Monet’s fleeting light effects. All this passed Victoria by entirely. At the Royal Academy annual exhibitions, her impulse purchases were William Powell Frith’s hard-edged, minutely recorded panorama of English society, “Ramsgate Sands: ‘Life at the Seaside’”, a pyramid of paddlers and parasols, and Frederic Leighton’s huge, chiselled crowd scene “Cimabue’s Madonna Carried in the Procession” – “a beautiful painting quite reminding one of a Paul Veronese ... Albert was enchanted with it – so much so that he made me buy it.”

The Leighton, illustrating a story from Vasari, is a typical Victoria and Albert picture: she enjoyed its narrative verve and detail; he liked the historical subject and careful construction according to Renaissance principles of harmony.

A highlight here is a small gallery showcasing Albert’s acquisitions of Renaissance pictures, by then underrated artists, that hung in his writing room: Cranach’s exceptional “Apollo and Diana”, sinuous and appealing; Hans Baldung Grien’s portrait of a vulnerable young man, full of pathos and character; a delicate Crucifixion triptych by Duccio, bought in Florence for £190 and the first work by the Italian to enter Britain; and Zangri Strozzi’s “The Madonna of Humility with Angels”, in brilliant pure colours and gold on panel, acquired as a Fra Angelico and framed in an azure and gilt frame of Albert’s own design.

Albert emerges here as a scholarly, enlightened figure. Victoria’s purchases are more florid and sensual: over her desk hung Winterhalter’s cavorting nudes “Florinda” (£1,000 from the artist, paid in two instalments). The couple’s taste met poignantly in an outlandish copy of a Raphael, Albert’s favourite painter; unable to afford an original, Victoria commissioned a large porcelain copy of the Berlin Gemäldegalerie’s “Colonna Madonna” to give him for Christmas 1858. The smooth ceramic sheen emphasises both Raphael’s sweetness, and the impression that in surrounding themselves with such serene pictures the couple were mythologising their own family happiness.

We know their marriage was in fact turbulent – Victoria was as passionate and irrational as Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen; Albert, a foreigner in an unwelcoming land, struggled to find a role in a house where he could not call himself master – but it would take a heart of stone not to be moved by the final room of memorials to the prince assembled by Victoria after his premature death at 42. Gleaming across this sepulchral gallery is a stunning gold and jewelled model of the Albert Memorial presented by the Sultan of Johor. It marries Victoria’s personal and public life – grieving widow, Empress of India – and exquisitely expresses how this collection is a glass through which Victorian England comes alive as a place of intense individualism, which also opened out to the world.

‘Victoria & Albert: Art & Love’, Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London, March 19-October 31. Tel: (+44) (0)20 7766 7301 www.royalcollection.org.uk