Art: £2m Despite being surrounded by the world’s greatest art and furniture collection in her many homes, the Queen’s own art collection is relatively insignificant. Palace officials claim she does not have much art of her own. However, she did set up an art fund early in her marriage that has backed Prince Philip’s purchases. Moreover, very little of the art and furniture in her two privately owned homes, Sandringham and Balmoral, belongs to the Royal Collection. The Queen’s commissioning of contemporary art has been limited to records of her horses and corgis and to portraits. Some of the horse pictures are by well-known artists, including a series of oil paintings by Susan Crawford, whose father was a National Hunt trainer.But her private palaces also contain pictorial depictions of royal hunts and shoots during the golden Victorian and Edwardian ages.

Many of the pictures are by Sir Edwin Landseer, while the royal portraiture tends to be by Franz Winterhalter. At Balmoral, there is a tartan Minton tea service that was designed by Prince Albert. Shares and investment portfolio: £100mThe Queen’s investments are shrouded in mystery and her dealings on the stock markets are hidden by the use of the Nominees of the Bank of England, a nominee company. Although reports do occasionally surface as to her investments ­ in recent years these have included the Poptones record label and Getmapping ­ these invariably come from investments through the Privy Purse and not her private portfolio We have no clue what she invests in personally.. An analysis of the Queen’s wealth shows that she holds assets worth £17bn in trust for the nation. Constitutional experts argue that hundreds of years of history have helped to muddle the issue of royal title. Recent efforts by MPs and the National Audit Office to shine a light on the relationship between the flow of cash involving Parliament and the Queen has exposed a complex area of Palace accounting and royal double speak.As the Queen faces a rising tide of bills, as revealed by The Independent yesterday, and confronts the financial reality of having her state funding frozen for another nine years, greater strains will be placed on her public and private purses.

MPs and constitutional experts warn that there will inevitably be occasions when the Queen uses the money from the Civil List to finance her private affairs.The question asked by constitutional experts such as Vernon Bogdanor, professor of government at Oxford University, is: when does a visit from a personal friend who happens to hold state office become an event that is funded by the Government and when is it something which must be paid for by the Queen’s personal money?Two years ago, Parliament’s financial watchdog, the Public Accounts Committee, called for full scrutiny of the royal palaces after one MP accused the Queen’s aides of “siphoning off” money earmarked for fire restoration work at Windsor Castle. Alan Williams, the Labour MP for Swansea West, claimed £14m from ticket sales to Buckingham Palace had been diverted from fire restoration over a five-year period and through a “bizarre” formula had gone into the Royal Collection, the Queen’s charity, which looks after her pictures and other art works.The MP claimed that money was “sliding into royal palaces in a way which is not accountable to Parliament”. He said: “This was money that was charged for entry to one of our taxpayers’ palaces They are state assets, not the personal assets of the Queen. The cost of maintaining them is met by grant-in-aid, and that is government money. The charity are getting £14m that they weren’t entitled to before and I would suggest they are not entitled to now.”The business of the Royal Collection, which is larger than the Tate Gallery, the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery, is accountable only to the Charity Commission.But a Treasury minute on a report of the Public Accounts Committee shows that as long ago as July last year the Palace told the Government that it had no intention of exposing the Collection’s accounts to wider scrutiny The minute says: “… the Royal Household sees no justification for the Trust to be singled out for different audit arrangements from other charities.”Other European royal families how they compareBELGIUMSpeculation last year about the size of its fortune forced the family to issue an unusual clarification.