Royal Portrait of Queen Mother Auctioned at Lyon & Turnbull
Published July 7th, 2008
A painting of The Queen Mother with her daughters, Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, sold for £90,000 in Lyon & Turnbull Fine Paintings sale on 29th May. The painting by Charles Edmund Brock is accompanied by a letter dated November 1933 from HRH The Queen Mother asking the artist for a price to paint the portrait.
The portrait, entitled ‘A Royal Portrait of Elizabeth the Queen Mother and her daughters Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret’ is signed and dated 1936 by Brock and was bought by Mr Alexander Meddowes, a Fine Art Broker in Edinburgh. Brock painted the two Princesses earlier in 1933 for King George VI who chose the studies to hang in his private sitting-room at Buckingham Palace.
The letter to Brock from the Queen Mother, who was staying at Carberry Tower in Musselburgh, is dated the 13th November 1933 asking him the cost of painting a family portrait from Carberry Tower in Musselburgh. She writes ‘I do not like to mention prices etc. but I would like to pay for it and if you would paint us all it would be a delicious picture I know.’
‘From correspondence we know that the princesses remembered their visits to the studio’ said Nick Curnow, Managing Director and Head of Paintings at Lyon and Turnbull. ‘They describe how they had to pass messages to the artist in sign language as he was rather hard of hearing. There is also a letter from Queen Elizabeth to Brock after her father died, thanking him for his letter of sympathy saying how much he had enjoyed the paintings he had painted of them as children’.
The picture was on display at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden on the 4th August 1980 as part of a formal tribute to Her Majesty The Queen Mother on the occasion of her 80th birthday where it was greatly admired by the Royal Family.
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