Britain celebrates Golden Jubilee Celebration

Forget recession and definitely forget Olympics, Britain is splashing out to celebrate 60 years of its favourite royal, Queen Elizabeth II, as the country’s monarch.

With her approval rating at an all-time high, the queen is touring across the UK with her husband, Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, as her children and grandchildren visit the Commonwealth countries to celebrate the jubilee.

“Support for the royal family has always been consistently high but the queen will enter her Jubilee celebrations with support for the monarchy running at record levels. Given the choice, 80 per cent of Britons want to see Britain remain a monarchy, a jump of five percentage points, which could be attributed to the increased coverage of the royal family because of 2011’s royal wedding and this year’s diamond jubilee celebration,” Ipsos-MORI’s assistant chief executive Simon Atkinson says.

The four-day weekend in June, which includes a 1,000 boat pageant in the Thames river, Big Lunch and street parties, a thanksgiving service in St. Paul’s Cathedral, and a concert outside Buckingham Palace, has Britons waiting in anticipation as more than 1 million spectators are expected for the events.

However, the museums across Britain are hosting special exhibitions to pay homage to the queen and get a slice of the jubilee excitement.

 The special programmes are not limited to museums, banks, gardens, theatres, high-end luxury shops and even high street shops have planned events linked to the diamond jubilee.

A series of exhibitions, both ongoing and in recent past, explored the queen’s diamond jubilee using her portraits, ranging from photographs, to paintings, to stamps and even coins.

The National Portrait Gallery is displaying a range of queen’s portraits by Lucian Freud, Andy Warhol, Annie Leibovitz and Lord Snowdon to show her life in progression in the last six decades.

The Queen: Art and Image is the most wide-ranging exhibition of images in different media devoted to a single royal sitter, and the highlights include Pietro Annigoni’s 1954-5 painting of the queen, which is being displayed in public for the first time in 26 years, along with his full-length portrait of the queen, commissioned in 1969.

The first painting shows the recently-crowned 28-year-old Elizabeth wearing Garter robes and is depicted against a pastoral landscape. The second portrait has the queen in ceremonial robes again, but is shown standing against an ambiguous, spare and gloomy, plain background.

The gallery also has the world’s first ever lenticular image of the queen by artist Chris Levine and holographer Rob Munday.

“The queen is the most portrayed person in British history, reflecting her long reign and also the respect and affection that is felt towards her,” Sandy Nairne, director of the National Portrait Gallery, London, says.
The queen’s portraits on postage stamps, coins and currency notes are being exhibited at the British Postal Museum & Archive. The exhibition, Diamond Jubilee: Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 1952-2012, is divided into 3 sections with focus on two stamps, two coins and two banknotes, from initial concept to issue just after Elizabeth became the new queen in 1952.

Stamps from the Commonwealth depicting the queen as a princess, including the first stamp that ever showed her as the new queen, are also on display.

“I like the story the set tells the viewer. The picture of the queen addressing the United Nations in 1957 makes her look so vulnerable, she was very young and had not long become queen... The later images then show her relaxed and happy in her work to serve the nation. So I am pleased after such a long time that we can enjoy these stamps of the queen ‘in action’,” Kate Stephens, designer of the diamond jubilee stamps, says.

The real glamour to these artistic endeavours is provided by an exhibition of more than 60 ball gowns from 1950 to the present day on display in all their magnificence at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

The exhibition at V&A, which, recently held a two-month exhibition of portraits of the queen by photographer Cecil Beaton, has ball gowns ranging from specially-made designs for social events like private parties, to royal state occasions, debutante balls, opening nights and red carpet events by designers such as Vivienne Westwood, Norman Hartnell, Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, Victor Stiebel, Zandra Rhodes, Catherine Walker, Jonathan Saunders and Hussein Chalayan.

The glamorous dresses on display includes a ball gown designed for Elizabeth the Queen Mother, Princess Diana’s Elvis Dress, gowns worn by actresses and celebrities like Sandra Bullock, Daphne Guinness, Elizabeth Hurley and Bianca Jagger.