Too bald, too mad, too red … How royal portraits get it so wrong

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Jonathan Yeo’s divisive painting of the king raises the question of whether paintings of the monarchy have become irrelevant and anachronisitic

hy do reports always say that a portrait of someone great and good has been “unveiled”? The word is an empty metaphor that turns the first viewing into a ceremony; it also mystifies the entire procedure and makes it somewhat morbid.

“Is that it? Are you sure?” barked Prince Philip at the end of a sitting with Yeo in 2006. By contrast with his towering blow-up of King Charles, Yeo had squeezed Philip onto a canvas a foot square and given every angle of his taut, armoured face an edge of highlighted aggression. Despite his thin-lipped grin, Yeo’s Philip looks like a grenade with a loose pin.

Namatjira, no respecter of either wealth or rank, has his own view of Australia’s hand-me-down head of state. Last year he painted Kiing Charles sweltering in the arid outback, his chest festooned with unearned medals, his hand on a sword that is a theatrical prop, his head liquefying in the heat as it pokes out of a fussy Elizabethan ruff. The portrait is literally an act of lèse-majesté, a reappropriation of Australian terrain by one of its rightful owners.

 

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