The Royal Collection in Three Dimensions

Jonathan Marsden

Antonio Canova, Mars and Venus (detail),1815-19

The Royal Collection is perhaps most famous for its great Old Master paintings and drawings, French porcelain and furniture. In this talk, Jonathan Marsden considers another rich strand of the Collection which had not been examined as a whole before the appearance of his new catalogue, European Sculpture in the Collection of His Majesty The King, in autumn 2025. This exercise gives rise to an important question: does this constitute a ‘collection’ or is it merely the result of centuries of accumulation? Introducing highlights and new discoveries from Cellini to Canova, Jonathan Marsden will also discuss the extent to which monarchs have used the medium of sculpture to represent and project their presence and power in Britain’s royal palaces over the last 500 years.

Jonathan Marsden was Director of the Royal Collection and Surveyor of The Queen’s Works of Art from 2010-2017, having served as Deputy Surveyor since 1996. He was a research assistant on The Treasure Houses of Britain exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC (1985) and subsequently worked for the National Trust as a Historic Buildings Representative in North Wales and Oxfordshire. He serves as a Trustee of English Heritage and is Chairman of the Furniture History Society.

His new catalogue European Sculpture in the Collection of His Majesty The King runs to four volumes with 2,000 illustrations. It covers some 1,800 works of art dating from the late 15th to the late 20th century, in marble, bronze, terracotta, plaster and other materials, distributed across some fifteen residences and palaces from the Isle of Wight to the Highlands of Scotland.

You are warmly invited to a Christmas Drinks party in the Upper Hall after this lecture.