Three hundred years ago Britain was just begining to become the workshop of the world.
Our textiles, time pieces and guns were famous throughout Europe,
and as trade expanded, more people joined the ranks of the super rich.
The British acquired a new reputation during these years, for wealth and lavish expenditure -
on Old Master paintings that flooded into the country from the Continent,
and on a whole range of precious objects, trinkets -
and one of the most important conspicuous consumers was Frederick, Prince of Wales.
The Royal Collection has a number of items of exceptional workmanship and delicacy,
which give us an insight into Georgian fashionable taste.
Kathryn, what an amazing display, tell us about these things.
Well, you can see here a rather interesting assortment
of objects of the type that Frederick, Prince of Wales purchased.
Among them we have a number of snuff boxes.
Taking snuff was a great Georgian occupation. Sniffing tobacco powder?
That's right. They all have to be very firmly hinged, obviously, you have to keep your snuff dry,
but very much designed to sit in your hand, so very carefully designed.
But some of these are actually not for snuff, they are actually of use, so they do actually contain
either in this case we've got perfume bottles,
or some of them have small objects, almost like a little tool kit.
So you can see this one has got tweezers, and things for getting stones out of horses' hooves.
Exactly. It's your early version of a Swiss army knife.
So it's an ostentatious accessory, would that be how you'd explain it?
Very much so, particularly the ones we know belonged to Frederick are of particularly high quality.
We know he spent over £700 on a single visit to a shop that sold this type of item
so it gives a good idea of what sort of things he had.
Music and theatre gave Georgians a chance to climb the social ladder
outside the formality of the Court.
Frederick, an accomplished musician used these same things as a means of increasing his influence.
I've come to Kew Palace to meet Robert Woolley,
who is putting one of Frederick's most revealing purchases through it's paces.
Robert, most of us are familiar with piano as a keyboard instrument,
what's the difference between that and a harpsichord?
Well the harpsichord plucks the strings with plectra,
in this case made out of quills from ravens at the Tower of London,
whereas the piano uses small hammers with leather or felt.
Can we actually see how this works?
Yes of course.
Well this is a jack, it sits on the end of the key.
As you depress the key the jack rises and the plecra here plucks the string,
and then on the return journey, because it's on a hinged tongue, it slips back past the string
and the damper there just damps the sound, stops it vibrating.
What do we know about Frederick, Prince of Wales's interests in music?
Well, from the Mercier portrait, he's clearly playing a cello sonata and he was also a patron of opera
and had his own opera company, The Opera of the Nobility,
and the last musical director of that was Giovanni Battista Pescetti.
It was a rival to Handel's opera which was supported by George II,
so it was very much a rival outfit.
So if you were going to demonstrate it at its best, what sort of music would you use?
That's a very 'singing' sort of tone.
Very, and it harks back, I think, to lute music and the sort of arpeggiated texture and so on,
so that can bring out a more gentle and expressive quality,
that again the singing quality this instrument has.
Frederick, Prince of Wales wanted to be a player in the London political scene as well as a future monarch,
and in order to do this he needed to maintain himself and his court in a lavish style.
But he also needed to demonstrate that he had serious, well-informed and up-to-date taste in the arts.
Here at the National Maritime Museum we can see Frederick's biggest purchase.
It says alot about how he wanted people to see him.
This is Frederick, Prince of Wales's barge.
This is your statement object, your really having an opportunity to show-off here,
so that's exactly why he designed it like this.
But you've got to share the space with all comers, there's no 'Royal Lane'?
Indeed, the River Thames was used by hundreds of small boats, large boats.
How does it work then?
So you had these cross seats and then 21 oars opperated by the same number of oarsmen,
and then behind it you had the cabin, where Frederick and his guests would have been seated
and behind that you have the barge master, who's the driver, using the teller to steer the boat.
What does this tell us about Frederick, Prince of Wales's patronage of the arts?
Well this is thanks really to William Kent, who's the great genius of design of this age
and he's taken various area and objects of classical symbolism,
like the shell, for instance, and obviously here you have this Vitruvian scroll in the form of a wave,
so these all have a very, very clear naval symbolism.
And then curiously, you also have some oak swags, which are of course not particularly associated with the sea,
but of course the whole piece is made from oak.
But I think what is very interesting about this, is really the way that it's designed,
because of course it's a boat, but it's conceived as a piece of architecture,
and so if you look up here, you've got this amazing truss here which is turned into a sea monster,
and you could never do that on a building.
So you tear up the rule book with a boat?
Exactly, and this is where he really went to town, and did a fantastic job.
In 1751 Frederick, Prince of Wales died
and we will never know what the reign of Frederick I would have been like.
Some hints are provided by the reign of George III, Frederick's son,
who certainly took from his father ideas about the encouragement of science and learning.