The Print Room of the Royal Library at Windsor Castle houses some of the most precious and fragile works of the Royal Collection. They include works on paper such as Holbein’s drawings of key figures from the court of Henry VIII, which rarely see the light of day — and are extremely well preserved as a result.

Several of these drawings are coming to the Royal Academy for Charles I: King and Collector. Here, Desmond Shawe-Taylor — Surveyor of The Queen’s Pictures and co-curator of the exhibition — explains what they reveal about the differing tastes of Charles I and his eventual successor Charles II, and the changing perceptions of drawings as works of art in their own right.