Because they were so prudent in everything to do
with money, the Queen and the Prince can never be placed with
the heroic figures in the history of the Royal Collection: with
Charles I, Frederick, Prince of Wales, George IV, or even with
George III, but Prince Albert, serious-minded and deeply interested
in the history of art, devoted himself, with the ardent support
of the Queen, to bringing order to all parts to her collections;
and although his influence may have helped to stifle her more
spontaneous reaction to works of art, his influence on the development
of the collection is incalculably important. The Prince's legacy,
in what he had acquired and in the arrangement and display of
the collection, were held as a sacred trust by the Queen after
his death. At the time of her death in 1901 the Royal Collection
had grown enormously in size and was better documented and perhaps
more wisely looked after than at any previous time in its history;
and it is difficult not to lament the destruction from 1901 onwards
of so much of the environment which set off the joint achievement
of the Queen and Prince and the, perhaps inevitable, dispersal
of so many things which were, collectively, of such significance
for an understanding of their taste and artistic aspirations.
When Prince Albert came to England in 1840 to marry the Queen,
he brought with him, on the fearful crossing in a gale from Calais
to Dover, a little picture by Cranach of his famous ancestor,
Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony; and later in the year the
Queen gave him a copy of Cranach's portrait of Sybilla, Electress
of Saxony, with her son. The German element, in the growth of
the Royal Collection during the Prince's lifetime, was inevitably
strong. The Prince retained an enthusiasm for the work of Cranach.
Of pictures by, or associated with, Cranach, which he acquired
the most important were the Lucretia of 1530, which the
Prince bought from Nicholls for £ 500 in 1844, and the Apollo
and Daphne which he acquired in 1846 through the German professor,
Ludwig Gruner, who had been brought to the notice of the Queen
and the Prince by Baron Stockmar and gave them professional advice
on a wide variety of artistic questions and over many years, even
after he had been appointed Director of the Print Collection in
Dresden. Gruner's experience and the Prince's interest and wisdom
combined to give a very serious, and essentially Germanic, tone
to so much of what the Queen and the Prince did for the collection
during their life together.
