When the State Rooms at Buckingham Palace open to the public for the summer, visitors will step into one of the Palace’s grandest spaces looking better than it has in living memory. The Picture Gallery — the long, top-lit room where The King receives Heads of State — has undergone a once-in-a-generation re-display, and from Thursday 9 July it presents 120 masterpieces from the Royal Collection, almost double the 63 that hung there before.
Among them are paintings by Rubens, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Canaletto and Titian — some newly added, others reunited or re-paired to reveal fresh connections. Together with new emerald-green silk wall hangings and updated lighting, the effect is a striking visual transformation of a room seen by more than half a million people every year.
875 hours to hang
This was no quick refresh. Curators drew on historic watercolours, photographs, inventories and architectural schemes to devise the new arrangement, which took 875 hours to hang and brings the room closer to its historic appearance. It continues a long tradition: major re-hangs of the Picture Gallery have typically followed a change of reign, and this is the first since the accession of King Charles III.
“This re-hang is an exciting and rare opportunity to significantly increase the number of world-class paintings on display for visitors, in line with our charitable aim to share as much of the Royal Collection as possible. It continues the longstanding tradition of renovations and re-hangs in the Picture Gallery that have commonly taken place following a change of reign.”
Anna Reynolds, Surveyor of The King’s Pictures
The gallery itself was designed to show off George IV’s magnificent collection, as part of the architect John Nash’s transformation of Buckingham House into a palace. George IV died before the project was finished; the first arrangement was in place by the time Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, and it has evolved with changing ideas about how to display art ever since.
Highlights of the new display
A centrepiece of the re-hang is The Tribuna of the Uffizi by Johan Zoffany, a dazzling picture-within-a-picture that crams the famed Florentine gallery with masterpieces and animated visitors — works by Holbein, Rubens and Raphael are all identifiable within it. Commissioned by Queen Charlotte, it reportedly displeased her with its crowded, unconventional composition and was never hung in her apartments; it was, however, recorded in the Picture Gallery in 1841, making its return especially fitting. It anchors a new display celebrating the flourishing of British art in the 18th century, reflecting Queen Victoria’s hang of the 1840s, alongside George Stubbs’s A Rough Dog — believed to depict George IV’s pet — and Gainsborough’s elegant portrait of the musician Johann Christian Fischer.
Elsewhere, the re-display brings artists together in illuminating ways. Five paintings by Rembrandt (plus one from his studio) now hang as a group, while seven works by Rubens are united — including a standout pairing of his Self-Portrait with his portrait of Anthony Van Dyck. Hung facing one another, the two reflect a real friendship (Van Dyck joined Rubens’s studio as a teenager) and recreate history, since the pictures are known to have hung together at Whitehall Palace in the 1660s.
George IV assembled one of the world’s finest holdings of 17th-century Dutch painting, and its stars remain: Vermeer’s Lady at the Virginals with a Gentleman, acquired by his father George III, is now joined by Gerard ter Borch’s exquisite The Letter, an intimate scene whose silk-satin textures all but shimmer off the canvas. The influence of Caravaggio threads through the Italian, French and Flemish rooms too: his newly added The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew hangs near Van Dyck’s Christ Healing the Paralysed Man and the Le Nain brothers’ The Young Cardplayers. They join long-standing highlights including 12 views of Venice by Canaletto, a charismatic Portrait of a Man by Frans Hals and a Madonna and Child by Titian.
A closer look at the masterpieces
Fifty years of coral pink, and a return to green
The paintings are not the only thing to have changed. Over the centuries the Picture Gallery’s walls have been golden yellow, lilac (fashionable with the Victorians), crimson red and, for much of the 20th century, olive green — before coral-pink velvet was installed in 1976. After 50 years that fabric had deteriorated, and it has now been replaced with new emerald-green silk damask intended to last for the next generation. The result, paired with the denser hang, transforms the character of the whole room.
There are new arrivals beyond the Picture Gallery, too. A large oil study of King Charles III by Jonathan Yeo — made in 2023 in preparation for the first official portrait completed after the Coronation, and recently gifted to the Royal Collection by the artist — now hangs in the adjacent Silk Tapestry Room. In the Family Pavilion on the West Terrace, a new display for younger visitors reproduces handwritten letters sent to The King by children around the world, many touching on shared interests such as the environment and sustainability. Outside, a Rolls-Royce Phantom IV used by the Royal Family sits in the Grand Entrance Portico, and a new information trail leads visitors through the Palace Garden — past meadows with more than 320 varieties of wildflowers and grasses, and the bees and endangered beetles that live on the lake island.
If You Go
- What: The summer opening of the State Rooms at Buckingham Palace, with the re-hung Picture Gallery
- Where: Buckingham Palace, London SW1A 1AA
- When: 9 July – 27 September 2026 (open seven days a week in July and August; Thursday to Monday in September, closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays)
- Tickets: from rct.uk or +44 (0)303 123 7300 — with Young Person (18–24) and child concessions, free entry for under-fives, and a £1 ticket scheme for visitors receiving Universal Credit and other benefits. Tickets bought directly from Royal Collection Trust can be converted into a 1-Year Pass.
- Also on: Garden Highlights Tours and East Wing Tours are available with additional tickets
- Nearest stations: Victoria, Green Park and Hyde Park Corner
All images © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2026 / Royal Collection Trust. Installation and gallery photography by Ben Fitzpatrick and Peter Smith.
A Little Bit of London In Your Inbox Weekly. Sign-up for our free weekly London newsletter. Sent every Friday with the latest news from London!