The Royal Collection features more than one million works of fine and decorative arts – furniture, paintings, metalwork, porcelain, jewellery, armour, arms, and sculpture – housed in the spectacular interiors of royal palaces such as Windsor Castle, Buckingham Palace and Hampton Court Palace. Many of the works are masterpieces, but they are also ‘working’ objects that may be in use in the day-to-day life of the Monarch, his family, and visiting dignitaries.
This lecture draws upon insights from the 2023 Attingham Trust Royal Collections Study Program which Dr Matthew Martin attended courtesy of a Nina Stanton Attingham Scholarship from the Copland Trust. The study program allowed Dr Martin to experience privileged access to a number of English royal palaces and their collections.
Dr Matthew Martin is Lecturer in Art History and Curatorship in the University of Melbourne. From 2006 to early 2019, he was Curator of International Decorative Arts and Antiquities in the National Gallery of Victoria for a number of significant exhibitions exploring early modern European material culture. His research interests include the cultural aesthetics of European porcelain in the eighteenth century, patronage and collecting amongst early modern English recusant elites, material cultural exchanges between Europe and Asia in the early modern period, and the historiography of the decorative arts and their display in Western museums.
