It's here! Browse the 2024 Penguin Christmas gift guide
The Art Of Monarchy

The Art Of Monarchy

Summary

The Royal Collection is one of the most wide-ranging collections of art and artefacts in the world and provides an intriguing insight into the minds of the monarchs who have assembled it. In this series, BBC Arts Editor Will Gompertz examines dozens of these unique objects, in a quest to 'use the Collection as a prism through which to better understand the art of being a monarch'. From intimate portraits to epic tapestries, from the Coronation pen to the Investiture sword, from a treatise against Martin Luther to the first televised Christmas message, each has an absorbing history. Famous objects such as the Gold State Coach and the Imperial State Crown rub shoulders with lesser-known but still fascinating artefacts such as the Exeter Salt and the Wriothesley Garter Book. With the help of historians, academics and Royal Collection curators, Gompertz selects choice items to find out what secrets they reveal about the art of monarchy.

About the author

Will Gompertz

Will Gompertz is a world-leading expert in and champion of the arts. Having spent seven years as a Director of the Tate Galleries followed by eleven years as the BBC's Arts Editor and two years as Artistic Director at the Barbican, he is now the director of the Sir John Soane's Museum. Gompertz has interviewed and observed many of the world's leading artists, actors, writers, musicians, directors and designers. Creativity magazine in New York ranked him as one of the 50 most original thinkers in the world. He is the author of the internationally bestselling What Are You Looking At? and Think Like an Artist, both translated into more than twenty languages.
Learn More

More from this Author

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more