From the July/August 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
The Royal Palace in Oslo sits on top of a hill, the Queen’s Park stretching behind. It is easy to think of fairy tales as you approach it; when I was there the palace roof was covered in a dusting of snow. There is visible security outside, which is not a surprise, though it might be a surprise how close you can get before someone asks what you are doing there. As I arrive, the palace is ready for the arrival of the Council of State, essentially the Norwegian equivalent of the British cabinet, which meets with the monarch – currently King Harald V – nearly every Friday of the year. Even for someone who comes from a country as monarchically minded as the UK, it’s eyebrow-raising to encounter a democracy where the leading elected politicians meet with the King once a week. It also explains why, when I am directed to a gate at the side of the palace for my meeting with Queen Sonja, it feels less like entering a fairy tale and more like arriving on the set of The West Wing.
While the palace is the political centre of the Norwegian royal family, it is also their chief residence. For Queen Sonja, an artist and ceramicist who has been collecting art for the past 70-odd years, that makes her home rich with possibilities. Not only does the palace house the Royal Collection, with its paintings of coronations, monarchs and the green landscapes and dark woods of 19th-century romanticism; it is also one of the main sites of the Queen’s personal collection.
Queen Sonja has accumulated what is widely acknowledged as one of the finest collections of Norwegian art in the world. Beyond that, her collection comprises an exceptional group of contemporary prints by international artists, as well as decorative arts, especially glass. The Queen is a printmaker herself and has collaborated with artists such as Ørnulf Opdahl and Kjell Nupen, with whom she developed a relationship through her collecting as well as her own work.
Untitled (1976), Benny Motzfeldt. The Queen Sonja Art Collection
There is a certain inevitability about the Queen’s involvement in the arts. ‘I grew up in a home with pictures on the walls. I had a brother who played the piano and the saxophone, and he had a small band. I listened to him play when I was very small, I used to creep down the stairs and sit quietly and listen. So I think it came quite naturally,’ she says. It was when Sonja was a teenager that things took a seriously visual turn. ‘When I was about 16 years old, I had a friend who was the nephew of Rolf Stenersen, who was a great collector. The nephew, Johan Stenersen, also started to collect when he was quite young. He was very interested in art and he took us to see the Norwegian artist Jakob Weidemann. A small group of us went to Weidemann’s home and met him several times. He called us the Coca-Cola gang.’
Sipping Coke in the presence of Weidemann had a profound effect upon the Queen. Her dedication to the arts continued throughout her youth. At one point she took herself on a trip through Europe: ‘I took my car and drove all by myself from Oslo, on the boat and on the train again to Hamburg and then again, driving to southern France, south of Toulouse.’ This was not the mere holiday trip of a pleasure seeker – she was, in fact, on her way to work as an au pair – but also the beginnings of an approach to the arts that involves a level of enquiry and understanding that is clear in the collection today. ‘I drove with Gombrich’s Story of Art books as a guide, and so I visited most of the churches on the route, and of course the chateaux,’ she says.
Queen Sonja travelled to the south of France many times. Evidence of how these trips affected her can be found at the family’s summer coastal retreat at Mågerø, where you will find outdoor illuminations inspired by the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul de Vence. ‘Along the road, they had constructions, small stones with a hole and a light hanging in there. I copied them for the summer house,’ she tells me, not without a hint of pride.
Another trip included a visit to the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands, when Sonja was about 20 years old. To her, what stood out in particular were the ‘sculptures out of doors’: the Kröller-Müller is renowned for its sculpture park. It contains some of the most important and famous modern sculptures in Europe, with works by artists such as Henry Moore and Jean Dubuffet – a fact that points to something in the taste of Queen Sonja. This is not a member of the Royal Family on the lookout for tradition but a collector who appreciates the strikingly contemporary.
Grønt hus (The green house) (2011), Hanne Borchgrevink. Queen Sonja Art Collection. © Hanne Borchgrevnik
Before I meet the Queen, I am taken by her curator to look at three works by Opdahl. They are not in the public part of the residence but on the ground floor of the private apartments, in a low-lit room with a slate floor and effortlessly elegant furniture upholstered in tan leather. The works themselves are only about a metre squared, but seem bigger – the monumental abstracted storm clouds that Opdahl paints in shades of greys and blues take on a presence that presses into the room. The theme of storms off the west coast of Norway could easily be one for the more traditional artists of the Royal Collection, yet on the private side of the palace, the subject is given a concertedly modern flavour.
When I am taken up in a lift to meet the Queen, she greets me as the sliding doors open, looking immaculate in her cream wool dress. Before we discuss the collection, she is going to show me around the Private Apartment to see her art in situ. The palace was built in 1849 but was only lived in forshort periods of time when the Norwegian-Swedish King visited Oslo. With independence from Sweden came the need for a more permanent home for the Royal Family. In 1905 King Haakon VII and Queen Maud moved in, and their arrival required the insertion of more suitable royal apartments.
When the current King Harald ascended the throne, it was apparent that the palace required modernisation. The public parts of the building underwent renovation between 1993 and 1999. The private apartments were updated at the start of the millennium, with rooms carved out of rooftops and staircases between the different wings of the palace. The clarity of the neoclassical proportions is always apparent but there is a domestic, even personal scale. The dining room, for example, is a beautiful 19th-century room with a pale grey silk damask on the walls, but the taste of Queen Sonja is clear in the vast burst of neon pink in Olav Christopher Jenssen’s abstract painting Palindrome No. 11 (2000) at one end.
Palindrome No. 11 (2000) by Olav Christopher Jenssen in the dining room in the Royal Apartment of the Royal Palace, Oslo. Photo: Øivind Möller Bakken
Perhaps these Pop-art-like colours should not come as a surprise. Although Norwegian masters of the late 20th century dominate the collection, perhaps the best-known story about Queen Sonja is that she went to visit Andy Warhol at the Factory during an official visit to the United States in 1982. The Queen makes a habit of visiting artists wherever she travels. ‘I think the very best thing to do is to meet artists in their own environment, in their own working place,’ she says. In 1982, waiting in her New York hotel room when she returned from Minnesota was an invitation from the Factory, organised by the American protocol team at the embassy. She went with her friend, art collector Johan Stenersen. ‘We waited at the Factory for a long time before we came to talk to Andy Warhol. He was a shy person.’ But this didn’t stop the pair asking questions, ‘because we were always interested in how he worked. He said that he put on white powder on the face of the person he was photographing as a background draft for his silkscreens. And then Johan looked at me and said, “Would you like to try?”’
This was not quite the clincher that it might have been. The Queen remembers that she ummed and ahhed a little, and ‘asked if we could wait till after we had lunch with the King. We were welcomed back and proceeded with the King’s approval’. Warhol took 21 polaroids; they are now all in Queen Sonja’s collection along with two of the six silkscreens he produced from the photographs. While the Factory was ‘a bubbling place with lots to look at while we were waiting’, she remembers Warhol as ‘a sensitive person’.
The visit to Warhol was not a one-off. Queen Sonja is friends with Bill Goldston, who owned and worked at Universal Limited Art Editions, the Long Island company that specialised in producing artists’ prints. In the 1960s, artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg came to the studio to make prints. It was through this connection that the Queen ‘managed to meet Rauschenberg – there was a bicycle in his studio and he lifted me up on to it’. She has the photograph to prove it.
Celebrities: Crown Princess Sonja (1982), Andy Warhol. Queen Sonja Art Collection. © 2025 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Licensed by DACS, London.
While the Queen’s collection is rich in prints by this generation of US artists – Viola (1972) by Jasper Johns is particularly notable – the reason that they are represented in this medium is one that almost all collectors face. ‘I would have loved to collect US artists but it was very costly.’ Her interest in prints was confirmed by the establishment of the Queen Sonja Print Awards (QSPA), three prizes given out every two years to promote graphic art. The most recent recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award was Anselm Kiefer for his work in woodcuts, but it is the QSPA Inspirational award that seems to me to best reflect the Queen’s attitude to the arts. The award is for emerging graphic artists and printmakers from the Nordic countries, a way of supporting artists who, because of what they make and where they live, might be overlooked by the international art world.
A similar sense of sharing is apparent in a museum, the Queen Sonja Art Stable. The conversion of this building into a museum space was a surprise gift to the Queen for her 80th birthday. Norway’s Lord Chamberlain managed to empty the stable – which was previously being used for storage – and proposed the conversion to the King. On the opening day, ‘We walked down, and I didn’t understand why we were walking there, but we were, and it was all opened up and filled with people and family. It was just fantastic.’ It is a project the Queen follows closely and a museum uniquely placed to show off parts of the Royal Collection that would otherwise remain hidden from public view. The current exhibition of royal ceramics is a feast for dinner service lovers.
When you discuss the Queen’s collection with her, you can see that it is most of all the work of an artist. ‘I’ve been quite interested in graphic art and fine art printmaking,’ she says, ‘And I think that opens up your eyes even more for lines in the landscapes and countryside, wherever you are. I think your eyes actually perceive a bit more when you are doing art yourself and especially fine art printmaking, because there are so many ways of working with printing techniques.’
What the Queen’s collection contains is evidence of all those different ways of seeing. And while it might not have an encyclopaedic group of Abstract Expressionists or Pop artists, there are powerful and strong inclusions. The works by Anna-Eva Bergman stand out for the strength of their form and could stand up to any artist from the United States; while the Queen hesitates to name an absolute favourite in her collection, she does declare these works to be ‘absolutely fantastic’.
‘What happened in my life is reflected in the art,’ she says. It was not a carefully plotted collection – there was ‘no structure, no plan, nothing’ – and yet in each work ‘you can discover something you haven’t seen for years’. But when I ask what the plan is for the future of the collection, the Queen says, ‘We are working on it.’ It is, in one sense, the same way she has collected over the years – by working on it. She has met and researched more Norwegian artists than almost anyone from her generation, selecting the works that speak to her. In doing so the Queen has put together a collection that is uniquely Norwegian and uniquely hers.
From the July/August 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.