Queen's House is a former royal residence in the London borough of Greenwich, which presently serves as a public art gallery.

In its current setting, it forms a central focus of the Old Royal Naval College with a grand vista leading to the River Thames, a World Heritage Site called, Maritime Greenwich.

Jones' unique architecture of the Queen's House also includes features like the Tulip Stairs, an intricate wrought iron staircase that holds itself up, and the Great Hall, a perfect cube.

[4][5] However, the house's original use was short, no more than seven years; The English Civil War began in 1642 and swept away the court culture from which it sprang.

Artworks that had been commissioned by Charles I for the house, now reside elsewhere; These include a ceiling panel by Orazio Gentileschi, Allegory of Peace and the Arts, which is now installed at Marlborough House, London,[7] a large Finding of Moses, now on loan from a private collection to the National Gallery, London,[8] and a matching Joseph and Potiphar's Wife, still in the Royal Collection.

In early designs of the Queen's house, Jones experimented with using the Corinthian Order in public, which at the time was used as court architecture and was viewed as "masculine and unaffected".

The Great Hall is the centerpiece of the Queen's House and holds a first-floor gallery that overlooks geometric-styled black and white marble flooring.

Jemma Field describes the spaces as a place of political significance; "All objects and furnishings were appraised as signs of Stuart wealth, merit, and honour".

[18] Orazio Gentileschi, a favorite at the court of Charles I, was commissioned by Queen Henrietta Maria to decorate her "House of Delights".

The central tondo, the personification of Peace is depicted floating on a cloud and is surrounded by the figures representing the Liberal Arts, Victory, and Fortune.

The other twelve females are the personifications of the trivium(Grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and quadrivium(arithmetic, astronomy, music, and geometry) that make up the Liberal Arts.

[22] The team used a series of scaffolded flat beds to support them while they transferred a sketch to the ceiling, applied size to the outline, and then covered it with gold leaf.

[22] Wright took influence from the geometric patterning on the floor, the intricate details of the tulip staircase, and created a ceiling that reflects the Queen's House's geometry, beauty, and intracity.

Although the house survived as an official building, being used for the lying-in-state of Commonwealth Generals-at-Sea Richard Dean (1653) and Robert Blake (1657), the main palace was progressively demolished between 1660 and 1690.

This change in use necessitated new accommodations; Wings and a flanking pair were added to east and west and connected to the house by colonnades (designed by London Docks architect Daniel Asher Alexander).

In 1933, the school moved to Holbrook, Suffolk and its Greenwich buildings, including the house, were converted and restored; They became the new National Maritime Museum (NMM), created by Act of Parliament in 1934 and opened in 1937.

Following construction of the cut-and-cover tunnel between Greenwich and Maze Hill stations, the grounds immediately to the north of the house were reinstated in the late 1870s.

In some quarters, it provoked some debate: an editorial in The Burlington Magazine, November 1995, alluded to "the recent transformation of the Queen's House into a theme-park interior of fake furniture and fireplaces, tatty modern plaster casts and clip-on chandeliers".

[26] The house is now primarily used to display the museum's substantial collection of marine paintings and portraits of the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, and for other public and private events.

[27] The painting depicts Sir Samuel Cornish, 1st Baronet, Richard Kempenfelt and Thomas Parry on HMS Norfolk and was purchased by the National Maritime Museum, with assistance from the Society for Nautical Research.