Cole & Son | Palace Tales

Palace Tales is a toile that refuses to behave like one. Three buildings appear in it, the Tower of London, Hampton Court and Kensington Palace, and between them they carry close to a thousand years of English royal history, but the drawing is contemporary and pictorial rather than engraved, so the scenes have air around them and the composition breathes.

The detail rewards a slow reading. Ravens sit above the Tower keep, guarding the kingdom as the legend requires. In the Thames below swims a polar bear, which sounds like invention and is not: Henry III kept one, along with lions, in the Royal Menagerie. Kensington appears at twilight under the arching branches of Hyde Park, and a fallow deer walks towards the Hampton Court gardens, where Henry VIII once hunted. None of it is labelled; the pattern assumes you will find it.

Made with Historic Royal Palaces, it has the authority of a design taken from real buildings rather than imagined ones. The 76.2 cm repeat and half-drop match spread the scenes so that no vignette lands twice in the same eye-line. A dining room, a study or a landing gives it the wall length it needs. Rolls are 0.52 m wide by 10 m long.