Over the past few years the Queen's Gallery has staged a series of elegant exhibitions highlighting the extraordinary riches of the Royal Collection. The latest to draw on the holdings of 7,000 paintings, 40,000 drawings and 150,000 prints is The Northern Renaissance: Dürer to Holbein. The 100 exhibits amount to a roll-call of the great names of the period and an overview of how Renaissance art shed much of its Classical idealisation in favour of detail and particularity when it crossed the Alps.

Among the highlights are an exquisite drawing of a greyhound by Dürer, a painting of a young man by the most rarefied of portraitists, Hans Memling, Brueghel's affecting snowbound Massacre of the Innocents, and a suite of 25 portrait drawings and paintings by Holbein. These are notable not just for the sitters (Thomas More, Jane Seymour, Princess Mary) but because several of the preparatory drawings accompany the finished pictures. 

Apart from Holbein, none of these artists is well represented in Britain and it is a rare chance to see such a gathering — with high-quality secondary artists too. The pleasure is not just Her Majesty's.