This room, at the north-west corner of Buckingham House, had originally been used as the Queen’s bedroom, but in the late 1760s it became her dressing room. It is shown by Wild soon after the completion of redecoration and refurnishing carried out from c.1812; this work involved brighter and richer colours, new curtains, carpets and upholstery, and bolder gilding. The carpet is particularly magnificent; it was probably a product of the Wilton or Kidderminster manufactories. This is one of the few carpeted rooms shown by Pyne: the King considered that carpets were potentially injurious to health, and his own apartments (on the ground floor of Buckingham House) were therefore uncarpeted.

In the new decorative scheme the walls were hung with light blue silk, and a deeper blue velvet was used for the curtains and upholstery. The arrangement of the furniture - including a set of new giltwood chairs - suggests that the room may no longer have been used as a dressing room; the ‘dressing table’ - lit by a pair of King’s vases on torchères - between the windows is unusually high.

The paintings can all be identified from contemporaneous inventories, over the door on the wall opposite is Wissing’s William III (405644); the landscape over the mirror is attributed to Claude (404690), this and the mirror are framed on the upper level by two Dughet landscapes (left, 405320 & right, 405318) and on the lower by Claude’s view of Tivoli (left, 404688) and Dughet’s Landscape (right, 404647); the wall opposite the window has two Lely portraits as overdoors, Anne Hyde (left, 405508) and James, Duke of York (right, 403224), between them Ruben’s Winter (401417) hangs over his Summer (401416). Some of these paintings, like the Lely portraits, survived from the previous hang, but the landscapes were all recent introductions from the King’s rooms on the floor below.

Catalogue entry adapted from George III & Queen Charlotte: Patronage, Collecting and Court Taste, London, 2004