Kingsley Amis used to have sex dreams about the late Queen (“Oh no, Kingsley, we mustn’t!). We are yet to learn whether, in the three years since his coronation, King Charles III has invaded the fantasies of Britain’s novelists. Looking at a painting of him that adorns the cover of the latest edition of Tatler, I doubt it.
In an uncharacteristically drooping suit with hair like a cyberman’s helmet, His Majesty is not exactly shown to his best advantage in this picture. The Queen fares slightly better in the double portrait, which was commissioned by the magazine to commemorate the couple’s 20th wedding anniversary, but the overall effect is, as the Telegraph’s art critic put it, “static, flat and uninspiring”.
Tatler has form when it comes to putting terrible paintings of Royals on the front. Last year it carried a picture of the Princess of Wales so hideous it amounted to kicking poor cancer-stricken Kate when she was down. This latest effort is the work of Phillip Butah, a British-Ghanaian from Forest Gate in London who won the Young Artists’ Britain: The Prince of Wales’s Young Artists’ Award aged just 16. The King has taken a close interest in the painter’s career ever since, inviting him on a Royal tour of Kenya in 2023. It’s a testament to both the King’s love of art and his charitable mission to help young people that he has nurtured Butah’s talent. But that doesn’t make this a good painting, and as a magazine cover it’s even worse.
Other artists have tackled the subject of King Charles with more success. Jonathan Yeo’s official portrait is more impressive in reality than it appears in reproduction — partly as a result of its sheer scale. Yeo is a high society flatterer who’s painted everyone from Cara Delevigne to Rupert Murdoch. His formula is to set an aggrandising but essentially shallow rendering of a person against a colourful, abstract background. It’s pleasing enough, but every era will get the status symbol painter it deserves — the 1880s had John Singer Sargent, we get Jonathan Yeo.
It’s more important in a portrait to evoke a sense of how the nation sees itself at a particular moment in history
Bryan Organ’s 1980 portrait of the then Prince of Wales is an enjoyable, pop-art piece. The seated, slightly bored pose is one of a man waiting for a purpose while the limp union flag is gently mocking. It has a bathos that would be unsuitable for a King but befits an heir. A companion picture of Diana Spencer caused outrage when it was unveiled the following year for depicting the Princess wearing trousers, and it was later vandalised by an anti-Monarchist who said “I did it for Ireland”.
With a few exceptions, there are hardly any good modern paintings of the Royals. And looking at Butah’s work alongside the photograph on which it’s based reveals why. The original photograph is charming, giving the viewer a genuine sense of the couple’s warm affection and Camilla’s notorious glint in the eye. Rendered in paint, the image loses all its humanity.
Photography has been the preeminent medium for depicting Royalty in the 20th and 21st centuries. When Queen Elizabeth II died, most national newspapers chose Cecil Beaton’s coronation portrait for their front covers. That picture best captures her beauty, dignity and the weight of the responsibility she carried her entire life. But its heightened colouring and artificial backdrop are a reminder that appearance for appearance’s sake is the essence of ritual.
Even artists of genius have failed to paint the late Queen for the same reason the Amis line is so funny: the idea of being so intimate and importuning with a Royal is absurd. Butah says: “as a portrait artist you need to understand the person behind the face — their emotions, their secrets, their soul”. But you can’t do that with the Royals because they aren’t like other people. As physical embodiments of the nation, they must simultaneously be seen to be believed while never letting in daylight on the magic.
David Hockney understood this, saying “I’m not sure how to paint her [Elizabeth II], you see, because she’s not an ordinary human being”. When discussing Lucian Freud’s 2001 portrait of Elizabeth II, it’s difficult to better The Sun’s front page headline “It’s a travesty your Majesty”. Freud liked to dominate his subjects, flaying them in oils during gruelling, hours-long sittings. He clearly wilted when confronted with the Queen who is reported, with supreme condescension to the then greatest living painter, to have said: “I’ve very much enjoyed watching you mix your colours”. The painting he produced from this encounter is a physically tiny apology for itself.
Consider the canonical Royal portraits, like the “rainbow” portrait of Elizabeth I or Van Dyck’s Charles I on horseback. These may be true to life (though it seems unlikely), but what’s more important is that they evoke a palpable sense of how the nation saw itself at a particular moment in history. But in the 20th Century, photography changed the game. By giving the illusion of candour, photography has convinced us that we can “know” the Royals.
Princess Diana bears chief responsibility for this. She had the most famous face in the world, yet of the 57 images of the King’s first wife held in the National Portrait Gallery, Organ’s is the only painting. David Starkey has compared Diana to Henry VIII for the way she manipulated and controlled her own image. Henry, Starkey says “is the only monarch whose shape we remember” — a trapezoid for the chest, two triangles for the arms in puffed sleeves with fists on hips, two lines for the wide apart legs and a triangle for the codpiece. But while Henry used Holbein’s portrait to project his power as head of the church as well as the country, Diana projected emotion. Whether sitting alone outside the Taj Mahal or arriving at the Serpentine Gallery in her “revenge” dress, Diana used her own image to tell a story about herself. But, of course, it’s a story as manipulative as any piece of Tudor propaganda.
In our superficial age, we have fallen for the idea that a Royal portrait must give us a false sense of intimacy with an individual Royal — and photography pulls that trick off more easily than painting. But “the person behind the face”, as Butah puts it, is necessarily unknowable while also being the least compelling thing about monarchy. What’s far more interesting is what their images can reflect back about our own national identity. Looking at this weak likeness on Tatler’s glossy cover, Britain will draw a blank.
