The Royal Collection at Buckingham Palace
The White Drawing Room in Buckingham Palace is where Her Majesty The Queen usually enters the State Rooms when hosting a formal Reception, passing through an enormous hidden door which is formed from one of the four side cabinets and mirrors. The entire structure – complete with Sèvres vase and candelabra on top – swings forward giving access from The Royal Closet next door.
The White Drawing Room is one of the principal reception rooms added by the architect John Nash in the 1820s along the West front of the Palace, overlooking the garden. After George IV ascended the throne in 1820, Buckingham House, or The Queen’s House as it was familiarly known during the reign of his father, George III, was transformed from a comfortable but not especially grand London villa into a magnificent palace. The sovereign – and London – had lacked a great palace since Whitehall Palace burned down in 1698. It was only during George IV’s reign that a palace was finally started, though it would not be completed and occupied by the sovereign until Queen Victoria moved there in 1837. In the centre of the West front is the bow-fronted Music Room, and to either side is the South Drawing Room (now known as the Blue Drawing Room) and the North Drawing Room (now called the White Drawing Room). Most palace buildings constructed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were planned with a formal system of graduated access in mind, whereby the approach to the person of the sovereign is met with gradually increasing grandeur in interior decoration. That system was outdated by the early nineteenth century, so George IV and his architect John Nash arranged rooms of equal splendour throughout the Palace, with a Picture Gallery running through the centre.
Like all the State Rooms, the White Drawing Room contains magnificent English and French furniture and porcelain. Remarkable pieces include four carved & gilded wood pedestals with stork supports, made by the prolific firm of London cabinet-makers Tatham, Bailey & Sanders, made for Carlton House in 1811. The magnificent marquetry and gilt-bronze-mounted roll top desk was produced by the famous eighteenth-century Parisian cabinet-maker Jean-Henri Riesener. A white marble statue of the ancient Greek poet Sappho, by the English sculptor William Theed, made in 1851, was bought by Prince Albert for £157 and given to Queen Victoria in the same year. Like many of the State Rooms in Buckingham Palace, there are Sèvres vases, including the large vase ‘Boileau’ of 1762 on the mantelpiece below the portrait of Queen Alexandra by François Flemeng of 1908.
