Awkward exchange of gifts with President Joachim Gauck is followed by boat trip, meeting with Angela Merkel, lecture and banquet on first full day of trip

Maybe it was the fact that her childhood pony had been depicted in blue, but it was clear from the outset that the Queen was less than enamoured with a portrait presented to her by the German president on Wednesday.

The Queen hints at desire for Britain to remain in European Union Read more

“That’s a funny colour for a horse,” she said as Joachim Gauck handed her the artwork.

The oil painting by the up-and-coming German artist Nicole Leidenfrost was based on a photograph taken in 1935 showing the future queen, aged eight or nine, on a pony being led by her father, George VI.

The awkwardness of the presentation only increased when, pointing to the king, she asked: “Is that supposed to be my father?” Gauck, unable to hide the disappointment in his voice, replied: “Don’t you recognise him?” to which the Queen answered sternly: “No.”

The exchange of gifts between the heads of state took place in the president’s Schloss Bellevue residence in Berlin on the first full day of the Queen’s fifth state visit to Germany was followed by a boat ride along the river Spree. The Queen and Prince Philip were taken on the Ajax, an open pleasure cruiser built in the year of the Queen’s birth, 1926, and the British ambassador and ladies in waiting followed close behind in the Don Juan.

At the chancellery there followed a slightly less awkward encounter with Angela Merkel, who took the Queen on to her terrace to point out landmarks visible from her glass offices, including the Reichstag and Berlin’s Central Station.

A short video posted on Twitter by Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert – reportedly against Buckingham Palace’s wishes – showed the two women chatting in English, with Merkel tracing with her hand the former course of the Berlin Wall.

“And where the train goes, there, there was the wall … and I lived in East Germany, just 200 metres behind these railway tracks,” Merkel told her guest.

Steffen Seibert (@RegSprecher) Königin Elizabeth II. zu Besuch im Kanzleramt: Rundgang + Blick über Berlin mit Kanzlerin #Merkel. #Queenbesuch https://t.co/IjdDuYTVym

Returning indoors, the pair perched opposite each other on a white sofa, Merkel expressing her appreciation for the Queen’s visit. “It is a remarkable year, 70 years after the end of the second world war,” she said, to which the Queen replied: “Yes, indeed. There are so many anniversaries.”

Asked by Merkel if she wanted a cup of tea, the Queen replied: “Yes of course.” As one was produced, Merkel informed her: “Usually I make it myself.”

Later, the Queen and Gauck attended the Queen’s Lecture, an annual event that was gifted by the Queen to Berlin on her first visit in 1965, and this year given by the outgoing British Museum director, Neil MacGregor, at Berlin’s Technical University.

The speech covered the political significance of everything from pet portraits commissioned by British monarchs to botanical gardens, and succeeded in linking the coronation to James Bond (who was invented in the same year, 1953), giving an excuse for an excited MacGregor to show the footage from the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics in which the Queen appears to parachute out of a helicopter with 007. The Queen was seen to gently smirk; the audience cheered.

Afterwards the Queen met university students who demonstrated a robot that waved and stamped its feet at the monarch, much to her obvious delight, as well as a 360-degree balloon camera.

The three-day visit, which will culminate on Friday with the Queen’s first visit to a Nazi concentration camp when she travels to Bergen-Belsen, in northern Germany, has sparked a huge wave of enthusiasm, with schoolchildren and office workers leaning over bridges and out of office windows for a chance to greet her.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Crowds get a glimpse of the Queen on the river Spree in Berlin. Photograph: Carsten Koall/Getty Images

Marc Schulz, 27, a technical operator with Deutsche Telekom, spent the day following the Queen around the city. “She is probably the most famous woman in the world right now,” the self-confessed Anglophile said. “She has met everyone from Churchill to modern-day Angela Merkel, and so it was great to share a moment in time with her on what is very probably her last visit to Germany.

“I’ve met Fiona Bruce, Ant and Dec and Boris Johnson, but this was a real bucket-list dream come true for me.”

Dominic Berg, 15, a pupil at Hildegard-Wegscheider school in west Berlin, who had a seat at the Queen’s Lecture and was waving a union jack, said: “It’s something to tell people I’ve seen her. She’s pretty old and she’s a very important person.”

His schoolmate Eliane Haase, 13, said: “This is a really great chance – and we appreciate that Merkel turned up with her too.”

German television carried blanket coverage of the day’s events, interspersed with footage spanning the Queen’s 89 years. Several German supermarkets ran promotions on British products.

“When the British Queen comes to Germany, even the most dyed-in-the-wool democrats turn into ardent monarchists,” said the financial daily Handelsblatt, in a commentary.

Royals aficionados have homed in on every detail of the trip, from the fact that the Queen is staying in the same hotel suite where Michael Jackson dangled his baby out of the window, to the origins of her outfit, a silver and white coat suit that she wore for the diamond jubilee river pageant.

On Wednesday evening, she spoke at a state banquet hosted at Schloss Bellevue for 700 guests, including David Cameron.

On Thursday, the Queen and Prince Philip will travel to Frankfurt where they will be joined at a dinner by two of Philip’s German relatives, Georg Donatus, hereditary Grand Duke of Hesse, and Maximillian, Margrave of Baden.

In return for the painting of the blue horse, the Queen presented Gauck with a first-edition, four-volume set of early 19th-century letters of Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, a German nobleman, in which he chronicles his journey around the British Isles, Ireland and France. Gauck presented Prince Philip with a luxury box of Lubeck marzipan.