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In his influential edition of the works of Alexander Pope (1871-79), Whitwell Elwin describes Queen Anne as "ugly, corpulent, sluggish, a glutton and a tippler." If modern historians are more polite, they still underestimate Anne’s intelligence and ability. By approaching the life and reign of this popular and successful monarch through her knowledge and patronage of the arts, I intend to provide a more balanced picture. She was a highly competent performer on the guitar and the harpsichord, an excellent dancer and actress in her youth, a fluent speaker of highly idiomatic French, a shrewd connoisseur of painting and architecture, a promoter of opera, and a reader able to quote such poets as Cowley from memory. In crafting works of art designed to flatter and please her, artists including Dryden, Purcell, Lely, Kneller, Wren, Philips, Handel, and Pope reveal the complex and nuanced interplay between political and aesthetic motives that defines the culture of this fascinating period.