Victoria & Albert: Art & Love

You only have to look at the Victoria and Albert (V & A) Museum  to know that art was important to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert - forever commemorated in the Albert Memorial. This major exhibition, entitled Victoria & Albert: Art & Love, hosted by The Queen's Gallery at Buckingham Palace, explores their shared enthusiasm for art, displaying more than 400 paintings, drawings, photographs, jewellery and sculpture from the Royal Collection. Works dating from the time of their engagement in 1839 to the Prince's untimely death in 1861 range from a beautiful set of jewellery in the form of orange blossom to superb examples of early Italian painting. Bernardo Daddi's The Marriage of the Virgin, given by the Queen to the Prince for his birthday in 1846, is just one example of the personal nature of the exhibition with around a third of the objects on show exchanged as gifts between the couple. Like the popular 2009 film, The Young Victoria, Victoria & Albert: Art & Love also challenges the most commonly held image of Victoria as the dour widow.

NOTE: Pre-booking for The Queen's Gallery is strongly advised. A small number of tickets is held back for sale on the day. These tickets are available from the ticket desks at the Gallery from 9.30am on a strictly 'first come, first served' basis and are for one of the timed admissions that day.