Queen Elizabeth Unveils Previously-Hidden Artwork That Was Made for Her Childhood Christmas Plays

When Queen Elizabeth was a young girl, she and her younger Princess Margaret would perform Christmas shows for their family, friends and royal staff during WWII at their Windsor Castle home. To add to their performances, unique artwork decorated the walls to create a theater-like atmosphere.

Now, those previously-hidden pictures have been unveiled after staffers at the castle removed the portraits that had been layered on top of them.

The brightly-colored paintings had been hung around the castle’s Waterloo Chamber to compliment the princesses wartime pantomime shows, which Elizabeth and Margaret took part in from 1941 to 1944 to raise money for the Royal Household Wool Fund, which supplied yarn to make comforters for soldiers fighting on the frontlines.

At the start of the war, a series of portraits by Sir Thomas Lawrence that usually lined the walls of the Waterloo Chamber were removed from their frames for safekeeping. To make the space more festive, pantomime pictures were commissioned to cover the bare walls.

The Royal Collection Trust says the pantomime art was created by teenage evacuee and parttime art student, Claude Whatham, who was brought in to recreate fairy-tale characters. In a nod to wartime austerity, he painted them on rolls of wallpaper. While he worked in a temporary painting studio in the Garter Throne Room, he shared the space with Sir Gerald Kelly, who was working on portraits of the then King and Queen’s Coronation portraits.

[primary_media_image caption="Some of the wartime artwork unveiled at Windsor Castle" primary_image="12240579" orientation="default" /]

After the war, the portraits by Sir Thomas were returned to the frames – and the pantomime decorations have only been unveiled once before, after the fire at Windsor Castle in 1992.

The rarely-seen pantomime artwork was rediscovered as the portraits by Sir Thomas were removed to facilitate essential maintenance work and are now on display at Windsor Castle, which is opening to the public on July 23.

Four years ago, one of Elizabeth’s costumes from a 1943 performance of Aladdin, in which she played the title role, was put on display.

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As the castle prepares to welcome visitors this week, pictures were released of the Queen’s horses being returned to the Mews at Buckingham Palace from Windsor Castle.

The opening of Windsor and other palaces will help bring in much-needed income to the Royal Collection Trust, which has had to lay off many staffers because of the coronavirus crisis. The Mews at Buckingham Palace and the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh and the Queen's Galleries in London and Edinburgh are reopening too.

The Queen — who celebrated the surprise wedding of her granddaughter Princess Beatrice last Friday — will soon travel to Balmoral for her traditional summer break.