Revealed: Meghan outside the Royal Collection’s vast archives of over a million objects

According to The Mail on Sunday, there are no photographs of the Duchess of Sussex in the Royal Collection.

And yet there is an enormous archive with more than a million objects from five centuries of monarchy.

Works from the collection are often exhibited at royal estates, including the King’s Gallery next to Buckingham Palace, which is currently hosting an exhibition entitled ‘Royal Portraits: A Century of Photography’.

But while visitors to the exhibition enjoyed never-before-seen photos of Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret, tourists were surprised to find no photos of Meghan Markle or her two children, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet.

The MoS understands this is because the collection – which is held by the Royal Collection Trust, a department of the Royal Household – does not contain such photographs.

A photograph of Queen Elizabeth II by Andy Warhol in the Royal Collection at The King’s Gallery

The collection contains more than a million royal objects — but no photos of Meghan Markle

A visitor views a portrait by Paolo Roversi of the Duchess of Cambridge in November 2021

Images of the Royal Family do not automatically become part of the Royal Collection, but are often donated by the photographer or specially commissioned.

Royal Portraits contains five photographs of Prince William, but there are no pictures of the Duke of Sussex as an adult. Furthermore, he appears only once in a 1994 photograph taken by John Swannell.

It shows a young Prince Harry laughing with his brother William and his mother, Princess Diana.

The Royal Collection is not the property of King Charles, but is ‘held in trust’ for ‘his successors and the nation’.

A spokeswoman for the foundation said: “Royal Portraits… focuses on photographs taken during organised portrait sessions,” adding that the images in the collection “have been chosen for what they can tell us about the evolution of royal portrait photography.”