IT COULD have been a lot worse: the initial rumour was that countless Titians, da Vincis and Gainsboroughs had gone up in smoke at Windsor Castle; yesterday it had been established that a William Beechey equestrian portrait of George III and three other ''important paintings'' had been lost. This was comforting. The royal art collection has got off lightly - Beechey is hardly Titian. But questions need to be asked. Whose collection is it anyway? And is it being looked after properly?
 
The Queen's art collection is no longer the well-kept secret it once was, thanks largely to the Queen herself. She recently allowed Channel 4 into the royal palaces to film The Royal Collection, a series which, coincidentally, ended last night with a film on portraits of the British monarchy, including the incinerated Beechey.
 
Last year she loaned almost 100 of her paintings to the National Gallery for ''The Queen's Pictures''. That exhibition was well-attended, but many people did not understand why they had to pay to see works of art they considered public property.
 
Technically, they were wrong. The Queen's pictures are not public property. They are the Queen's property. But the Queen has never treated her paintings as personal assets, although their total value may exceed pounds 2bn. During her reign no major work of art has been sold from the royal collection. Its quality - it is one of the greatest collections of Old Masters in the world - and the circumstances of its acquisition have given it an ambiguous status that the Queen implicitly acknowledges: it is a public collection, you might say, privately owned. The Windsor Castle fire suggests that it is about time this ambiguity was resolved.
 
Which raises the question of how the royal collection is looked after....

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