The title of this exhibition, curated by Desmond Shawe-Taylor, a noted eighteenth-century specialist, and a team from the Royal Collection, reveals the concept behind it. It aims to give the visitor an understanding of a new age, not merely of a newly-imported dynasty, for the exhibition is about the Georgians, not just about the Georges. The image on the dust jacket of the excellent catalogue and on the flyer underlines this point, for it is not a portrait of a member of the royal family but rather William Hogarth’s delightful depiction from 1757-64 of David Garrick and his wife, the dancer Eva-Maria Veigel. Hogarth, to whom a whole section of the exhibition is devoted, was the major artist of the period, but the court did not patronise him and his success was due to the metropolitan sophistication of the capital, which the Garricks embodied. To emphasise this point further, the first room the visitor comes to is a mock-up of an eighteenth-century coffee house, complete with suitable background noise and a fireplace, flanked by cat and mice. Here we can browse relevant scholarly publications, try on a tricorne, glance at a facsimile of a contemporary news-sheet and watch some illuminating short films, introducing some of the ideas and objects in the show, before entering the exhibition proper and meeting the king and royal family.

Britain was not the only country to import a dynasty in the eighteenth century – in 1700 the Bourbons succeeded the Habsburgs in Spain, for instance – but it did so, not because there were no other legitimate claimants (there were as many as fifty, all Catholics), but to ensure that there would be a Protestant on the British throne. The claim of Georg Ludwig, Duke of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, Elector of Hanover (1660-1727), to the British throne was through his mother, Sophie of Hanover, the thirteenth child of the Winter King and Queen, Frederick of the Palatinate and Elizabeth of Bohemia, the latter a daughter of King James VI and I. The story the exhibition tells is how this dynasty of German princes, all married to German princesses, managed to blend into their new kingdom, see off the Stuarts and become accepted by their subjects, creating a new cultural synthesis in the process. Three hundred works from the Royal Collection, many of them shown for the first time, illustrate this process, through architecture, portraits, prints, furniture, documents, maps, tableware and snuffboxes. We learn about Georgian music, interiors, dining habits, collecting, science, sociability, even war.

The exhibition proper begins with portraits of the new royal family – Noël III Jouvenet’s depiction of Sophie of Hanover as the intelligent and strong-minded sixty-year-old that she was in 1692, Godfrey Kneller’s portrait of George I at a similar age, as well as the marble busts by John Michael Rysbrack of George II and his consort Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach and those by Peter Scheemakers of Frederick, Prince of Wales, the king who never was, having died before his father in 1751. Medals, so important in royal image-making in earlier ages and so often forgotten in our own, and engravings round out this section. We are also shown the Catholic royal family that had the greatest claim to the throne: James II, his second wife Mary of Modena and their children in a group portrait by the French arch-image-maker Pierre Mignard. Of the three Hanoverians shown here – George I, George II and Frederick – Frederick emerges most strongly as a personality, through the manuscript of his ‘Instructions for my Son George’ (1749), letters revealing his quarrels with his father George II, and through his collecting. In the gallery devoted to the paintings in the Royal Collection acquired during this period, we see how many of them were bought by Frederick. His taste ran not to works by contemporary artists but to such sixteenth-century painters as Andrea del Sarto and Benvenuto Tisi, called Il Garofalo, and even more to Italian and French seventeenth-century masters such as Guido Reni, Carlo Maratta, Eustache Le Sueur, Claude Lorrain, and Gaspard Dughet. He also collected Van Dyck, while Rubens was more to his father’s liking. The Kings of Great Britain and Ireland did not cease to be Electors of Hanover, so they could not denude their German residences of furniture and art works. They had instead to acquire new ones. The catalogue does an excellent job, in articles by Wolf Burchard, Rufus Bird and Desmond Shawe-Taylor, of explaining how the newly-acquired pictures were hung in the various palaces in England and how they fitted into the interiors.

The Georges did not, for reasons of money and political expediency, sweep away the Tudor Palace of St James in order to create a Versailles or recreate their own palace of Herrenhausen outside Hanover; nor did they seek to replace the Palace of Whitehall, which had burned down in 1698. Instead they remodelled what they found, the interior of Kensington Palace being a notable example. William Kent was the designer of choice and any visitor to The First Georgians should also go to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London to see another intelligently-designed show which complements it admirably: Julius Bryant and Susan Weber’s William Kent: Designing Georgian Britain, which is on until 13 July 2014 (see the Criticks review by Peter Lindfield). This shows us Kent producing designs for the monarch but also for such grandees as Sir Robert Walpole and Richard Boyle, Third Earl of Burlington. Kent’s style combined elements taken from Vitruvius, Palladio, Inigo Jones and the exuberant Italian Baroque he had seen during his travels in Italy between 1709 and 1719, and it encompassed every aspect of civilised life – buildings, furniture, interiors, gardens, sometimes even clothing.

What underpinned all this collecting and art patronage was war, and a large gallery in The First Georgians, and an equally large section of the catalogue by Kate Heard, remind us of this. As German princes, the Hanoverians were involved in the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48) over Maria Theresia’s claim to the Imperial crown, and the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), in which Prussia invaded Saxony, while at home they had to contend with the Stuart challenge, expressed in the Jacobite Risings of 1715, 1719 and 1745. It was not until 1745 that the Duke of Cumberland finally defeated Bonnie Prince Charlie at Culloden and the Hanoverians could sit securely on the British throne. That Britain was also a colonial power is illustrated here by two maps relating to British attempts to deprive the French of some of their Canadian territories in 1759 (Quebec) and their Indian possessions in 1760-1 (Pondicherry). The large number of manuscript maps and drawings in this section may not have the instant aesthetic appeal of portraits, snuff-boxes or furniture, but they are priceless sources of contemporary information and remind us of the human cost of all the luxury. The exhibition does not focus exclusively on the male members of the dynasty. George I had left the unfortunate Sophia Dorothea of Celle, his consort and mother of his son, in Germany, where she was imprisoned for thirty years for an alleged affair with Philip Christoph von Königsmark, who disappeared, probably murdered, in 1694. George II, however, married the extremely intelligent Caroline von Brandenburg-Ansbach (1683-1737), the correspondent of Leibniz and Voltaire. She unearthed Tudor portraits and works by Holbein and hung them on her walls to link the new dynasty with the Tudor past. She also collected portrait miniatures, and one of the revelations of the exhibition is the subtle enamels of members of the royal family by Christian Frederick Zincke (1684?-1751). Those interested in the queen can learn more about her from Joanna Marschner’s monograph, Queen Caroline: Cultural Politics at the Early Eighteenth-Century Court (Yale University Press, 2014).

The richness of the royal collections allows the curators to present silver-gilt tableware, Meissen and Chelsea porcelain, used at court in the new, more sociable style of dinner-party pioneered by Prince Frederick. We can imagine that these dinners and musical evenings were not a million miles from similar gatherings in the homes of British aristocrats of the period or even of wealthy merchants. The Georgians had accepted the Georges, and the period had, as Desmond Shawe-Taylor writes in the catalogue, begun ‘to settle, in the popular imagination, into an age of elegance and gentility’ (p. 26).

In short, the exhibition is highly recommended and, whether you can get to London to see it or not, at least buy the beautifully-produced and beautifully-written catalogue.

The First Georgians: Art & Monarchy 1714-1760 is at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London, from 11 April to 12 October 2014.

It is accompanied by the catalogue The First Georgians: Art & Monarchy 1714-1760, edited by Desmond Shawe-Taylor (Royal Collection Trust, 2014).