A right royal collection

The best-known exchange between artist and royalty must be George VI’s celebrated remark to John Piper, who had been painting the castle and surrounding parkland at Windsor: ‘You seem to have had very bad luck with your weather.’ It was the early 1940s, and Piper had invested his watercolours with a brooding quality he no doubt thought appropriate to the mood of the times, and which also echoed his own essentially Romantic vision.