Format:
Hardback
Publication Date:
June 2025
ISBN:
978-1-7384878-8-2
Dimensions:
180 Pages, 250 x 220 mm 
Illustrations:
80 colour and 20 b/w images
Price:
£25

Left: Luke Martineau, Balsamand Palace, 2010

• Overview
• The Author

• In 1985, King Charles III, then Prince of Wales, asked the painter John Ward to accompany him on an official tour to Italy to make an artistic record of the visit. In so doing, he began an inspiring tradition that celebrates its fortieth anniversary in 2025, with forty-one different artists having accompanied the King on sixty-nine official tours to eighty-seven different countries worldwide.

  This book relates the extraordinary stories of these visits and celebrates the work of the tour artists, who ranged from young students still at art school to celebrated artists whose work is exhibited at major galleries. Their recollections are revealed in a series of individual interviews, and their anecdotes, personal reflections and glimpses behind the scenes provide a fascinating insight into the unique essence of life on a royal tour.

  The book is both a celebration of the King’s initiative to support and encourage artists and a unique and compelling account of this very special royal tradition. Sumptuously illustrated with some of the many hundreds of works produced by artists who were inspired by the King’s generosity and his unswerving commitment to the arts, the book honours the power of an artist to record what a photograph never can, in the incomparable setting of a royal tour.

  Published in association with Royal Collection Trust

• The Earl of Rosslyn was a police officer for 34 years before being appointed as Master of the Household to The Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall in 2014. In 2023, he was appointed as Lord Steward of The Household and Personal Secretary to The King and Queen. In 2009, he was awarded The Queen’s Police Medal and was appointed a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order in 2014.

  Theresa-Mary Morton joined the Royal Household in 1984 as an Assistant Curator, working in the Print Room based in the Royal Library at Windsor. She was Head of Exhibitions for the Royal Collection Trust from 2002 to 2024. She is the author of A Souvenir Album of Flowers from the Royal Collection (1990) and Royal Residences of the Victorian Era: Watercolours of Interior Views from the Royal Library Windsor Castle (1991), Seven Portraits: Surviving the Holocaust (2022) and Windrush: Portraits of a Pioneering Generation (2023). She was promoted to Commander of the Royal Victorian Order in The New Year’s honours of 2018.

  Helen Rosslyn is an art historian, writer and broadcaster, whose published works include Rosslyn: Country of Painter and Poet; and A Buyer’s Guide to Prints; her films for the BBC include Bought with Love: A Secret History of British Art Collections and Rosslyn Chapel: Treasure in Stone. Having trained at Christies in London as a specialist in the Print Department, she is now Director of the London Original Print Fair. She is Arts Editor of Condé Nast’s Tatler magazine and the writer and presenter of the Tatler short-film series In the Frame.