Platinum Jubilee: The Queen’s Accession – a genuinely ‘breathtaking display’

In February 1952, 20 days after the death of George VI, the photographer Dorothy Wilding was tasked with taking the first official portrait shots of the new Queen, said Rebecca English in the Daily Mail. Wilding was no stranger to her subject: as royal photographer, she had first captured Elizabeth in 1937, when she was just 11 years old.

Yet the results of that 1952 session would go on to become “some of the most enduring” images of our monarch, forming “the basis for the profiles and silhouettes we see on stamps and coins to this day”. Wilding would take several more portraits of Elizabeth, all 24 of which are now on display at Buckingham Palace as part of a special exhibition to mark this year’s jubilee.

Displayed alongside these images is a “glittering” selection of the “priceless jewels” that the young monarch wore to sit for them. Taking in everything from an “iconic” diadem set with “1,333 brilliant-cut diamonds and 169 freshwater pearls”, to a Cartier brooch Elizabeth received as an 18th-birthday present from her father, it adds up to a genuinely “breathtaking display”.

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The “bling” on show is “sensational”, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. Over the course of the exhibition, we see coronets, tiaras, brooches and bangles, all bursting with magnificent gems – diamonds, pearls and “emeralds the size of Fruit Pastilles”. Some have exciting stories behind them: the Vladimir Tiara, for instance, once belonged to the Grand Duchess of Russia. An object of “interlocking, diamond-set circles and pendant emeralds”, it is so “indecently ostentatious” that it could probably have fomented revolution on its own.

Yet it’s Wilding’s photography that “sparkles most”. These “highly stylised” early portraits “defined how her subjects understood their new queen”, casting her as “beautiful yet remote”, like some “faintly smiling lunar goddess”. Wilding clearly “relished the contrast” between the Queen’s “flawless” skin and the ruffles and pleats of her haute couture dresses. “It’s startling to be reminded how glamorous she once was.”

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The show produces some interesting factoids, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. We learn, for example, that the reason the Queen faces right on our coins and stamps is that her father faced left, and that “unwritten royal protocol” demands successive monarchs alternate.

It’s also enlightening to see a number of unused Wilding portraits: several have Elizabeth “smiling broadly”; it seems nobody wanted to see “a beaming queen”. The climax arrives with a vitrine containing the Delhi Durbar necklace, a “piece of bejewelled magic” boasting rings of jewels alongside one of the stones cut from “the largest diamond yet found”. This “sublime bauble”, which the Queen ought to wear more often, is a highlight of a surprisingly “riveting” exhibition.

Buckingham Palace, London SW1 (rct.uk/collection). Until 2 October