Buckingham Palace Shocks with Salon-Style Hang
4July 11, 2026
Buckingham Palace’sPicture Galleryon July 9 unveiled a surprising new rehang of the palace’s collection that nearly doubles the number of works on view, from 63 to 120. The salon-style hang echoes those recently presented at the National Portrait Gallery and Tate Britain and harks back to a style popularized at the eighteenth-century Paris Salon and later favored in the Victorian era.
The Picture Gallery display traditionally changes each time a new monarch is installed. The once-in-a-generation rehang was undertaken at the behest of and under the watchful eye of King Charles III; the decision to display the works salon-style responds to the king’s stated desire to make as many works as possible available to the half million people who visit the gallery each year.
The refresh took 875 hours and sees the formerly coral-velvet-covered walls of the gallery overlaid with emerald-green silk damask. The lighting has been updated as well. Works that remain on view from the previous hang include a dozen scenes of Venice by Canaletto, Frans Hals’s Portrait of a Man, and a Madonna and Christ Child by Titian.
Among the new highlights of the rehang is Johan Zoffany’s The Tribuna of the Uffizi, which was commissioned from the German artist by Queen Charlotte but never hung in her chambers, as she is said to have been displeased with its crowded and unusual composition. Notable too is the debut of a display themed around eighteenth-century British art, which conjures the hang that occupied the gallery during the reign of Queen Victoria in the mid-nineteenth century.
Other works being seen anew in the refresh include five paintings by Rembrandt and one attributed to his studio, which are clustered together, as are seven works by Rubens; that hang pairs his Self-Portrait, previously on view, with his portrait of Anthony Van Dyck, newly added to the gallery.
The compiled masterpieces are punctuated by a single contemporary work: a portrait of King Charles III by Jonathan Yeo, installed adjacent to the Picture Gallery in the Silk Tapestry Room, which sparked controversy when it was unveiled in 2024.