The State Bedchamber, directly above the Chapel, was the ceremonial climax of the State Apartments sequence. Though no monarch ever slept here, it was decorated to suggest the possibility.
On the ceiling, French artist Louis Laguerre painted Aurora Dispersing the Night (1692–94), a conventional dawn scene appropriate to a bedroom, in which the goddess of dawn chases away Diana, goddess of the night.
Around the coves are scenes of Diana bathing and hunting, painted with sensuous detail. The imagery associates the royal bedchamber with renewal, chastity and the cyclical triumph of day over night.
The bed itself, with crimson velvet hangings and embroidered in gold, was placed under a canopy of state, elevated on a dais. Such beds functioned as political thrones as much as sleeping furniture, places where audiences could be granted and power visually affirmed.
Learn more about the State Bedchamber here.
Images taken by Sarah Rawlinson at HeritagePhotographs.com
