Lights, Camera, Royals!

For Cavaliers and royalists in seventeenth-century England, the Eikon Basilike ranked with the Bible as a sacred text. Published almost as soon as King Charles I was executed in January 1649, and purporting to be his spiritual diary, it went through innumerable editions despite the attempts of the Cromwellian regime to suppress it. The book contributed greatly to the cult of Charles the Martyr and maybe even helped pave the way toward the Restoration of his son Charles II in 1660. Its Greek title means “the image of the king”—“eikon” or “icon”—which is echoed in its subtitle, “the pourtraicture of His Sacred Majestie in his solitudes and sufferings.”

The use of “portraiture” to describe a written text may have been unusual, but visual images, or icons, of the monarch had been familiar enough since even before the Roman emperors with their marble busts and silver coins. Millions of subjects who would never see their king or emperor in person could gaze upon his image—or hers: Queen Elizabeth I was portrayed as Gloriana, after the eponymous royal in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. King Charles’s face was found on grand paintings which were seen by the few and cheap engravings which were known to the many.

A generation later the Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck painted Charles I resplendent on horseback, while in the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh hangs John Michael Wright’s portrait of an enthroned Charles II, who can never quite wipe a cynical, or maybe lecherous, smirk off his face. Nor can he compete in grandeur (or grandiosity) with his contemporary le roi soleil, Louis XIV of France.

There are few hints of cynicism and still less of lechery in a large variety of portraits of kings and queens to be seen in London this summer. The fascinating exhibition “Six Lives: the Stories of Henry VIII’s Queens” at the National Portrait Gallery is the first show ever to bring together the portraits of those women. More recent members of the royal family can be seen tucked away in a crevice of Buckingham Palace in the absorbing “Royal Portraits: A Century of Photography” at the King’s Gallery (formerly the Queen’s Gallery). And Jonathan Yeo’s controversial new portrait of King Charles III, which was unveiled in May and now hangs at Drapers’ Hall in the City of London, is an unlikely mixture of exact likeness and playful fancy, like no other royal icon we have seen before.   

Hans Holbein the Younger’s painting of the bloodthirsty King Henry has been lost, but we know it all too well from reproductions: gross, domineering, repellent. The National Portrait Gallery exhibition gives his unfortunate wives—two of them divorced and two of them beheaded—voices and lives of their own. Painting in early sixteenth-century England was primitive by continental standards, and when portraits of the six queens are arrayed in a row they seem, if not quite indistinguishable, eerily similar, partly because of their near-identical gowns and bonnets. Anne of Cleves, the fourth wife, comes alive in one picture which is itself a curiosity, painted by the young Edgar Degas as an exercise from the original by Holbein in the Louvre.

National Portrait Gallery, London

Unknown English artist: Anne Boleyn, late sixteenth century, based on a work circa 1533–1536

National Portrait Gallery, London

Unknown artist: Katherine of Aragon, circa 1520

National Portrait Gallery, London

Unknown artist, after Hans Holbein the Younger: Jane Seymour, circa 1537

Private Collection/Photograph by Fraser Marr Photography.

Master John: Katherine Parr, circa 1547

Boleyn has always stolen the show, and she steals this one too, as she’s bound to do in an exhibition that is partly an exercise in reception history. The unfortunate Anne, accused of adultery and beheaded, became a tragic heroine, renowned throughout Europe. In this show we see her portrayed by Joan Sutherland in Anna Bolena, one of Donizetti’s three “Tudor” operas, along with Maria Stuarda and Roberto Devereux, and then by Henny Porten in Ernst Lubitsch’s 1920 movie Anna Boleyn.

After the Glorious Revolution and the Hanoverian succession, it was difficult to imbue the monarchy with the sacred awe those royalists had felt for the Stuarts. (As A. J. P. Taylor asked, “What sense had Church and King in an age of latitudinarian bishops and German princes?”) Grand or magnificent portraits of kings of England became harder to take seriously, although Sir Thomas Lawrence did his best with his painting of the bibulous, libidinous, but highly cultivated George IV, who was anything but a man of action. His great-grandfather George II was the last king of England to lead his army into battle, at Dettingen in 1743, although George IV suffered from the belief that he had been present at Waterloo, which came as a surprise to the Duke of Wellington.

Princes and princesses too were subjects of portraiture. The recent exhibition “Bruegel to Rubens: Great Flemish Drawings” at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford included a pretty 1637 drawing of the boy Prince James—later James II—by Anthony van Dyck, a study for his painting The Five Eldest Children of Charles I. Apart from romantic royalists such as the Tory politician Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg—who has been seen at a meeting of the Society of Charles the Martyr, and presumably regards the present King Charles as a usurper—history judges the Stuarts as doomed and disastrous, but they do retain a certain glamour and charm, well conveyed in van Dyck’s group portrait. Glamour and charm were, alas, qualities that most later royal sires lacked. George III and his wife, Queen Charlotte, had fifteen children, but although the king himself was a devoted husband, no one could very easily admire the eight royal dukes, Queen Victoria’s “wicked uncles,” energetic amorists who long failed to beget legitimate children.

In the nick of time, the Duke of Kent dumped his mistress, married, and fathered Victoria. Two decades later she had become a queen, a wife, and a mother—and “the royal family” had arrived in its new form, not only happy but embodying virtuous well-nigh bourgeois domesticity: see Sir Edwin Landseer’s gemütlich portrait of Victoria, Prince Albert, and their little eldest child Princess Victoria (later Queen of Prussia and Kaiserin), and plenty of dogs. By this point royal portraitists were striving to address a paradox: royalties are different but ordinary, or ordinary but different.

The King’s Gallery exhibition of photographs from 1924 to 2023 shows how another kind of royal portraiture developed over the course of the past century. It did so in two distinct directions: on the one hand formal, highly stylized portraits, and on the other attempts, of varying success, to show the royals relaxed and informal. The society photographers of interwar London, of whom Lenare was the most famous, aimed for an ethereal quality by way of soft focus—did they sometimes use a dab of Vaseline on the lens?—and then careful development and printing. In a photograph of Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon at the time that she was betrothed to the Duke of York (who became George VI while she became Queen Elizabeth), she seems enveloped in gossamer, surrounded by a cloudy aura entirely different from the kind enveloping saints in paintings from earlier centuries.

So it went through the 1920s and 1930s, and then came Cecil Beaton. His own first efforts at photographing royalties were also stylized to the point of being stilted: in a 1939 picture Queen Elizabeth—the former Lady Elizabeth—was again enveloped in gossamer as she twirled a parasol. Ten years later an equally artificial portrait has Princess Margaret bathed in distant effulgence. And yet Beaton, who almost cornered the market in royal photography, showed his flair in quite different pictures, some of which attempted an air of informality—a task sometimes easier said than done. When King George VI and Queen Elizabeth are seen inspecting the damage to Buckingham Palace caused by German bombs they seem a little awkward, and in a 1943 photograph the king, queen, and the teenage princesses Elizabeth and Margaret try to look cheerful despite the strains of war, with the king appearing notably unrelaxed as he sits at his desk in the uniform of an admiral of the fleet. His daughters smile at him with maybe a hint of anxiety.

A much happier example from 1942 has Princess Elizabeth, ten years before she became queen, in an unbuttoned tunic with cap at jaunty angle. She’s wearing a cap badge and brooch of the Grenadier Guards, whose honorary colonel she had just become, the first woman to hold that position. It’s almost as good as the snapshot of her in the last year of the war, this time wearing khaki overalls and leaning back on a truck she’d been fixing. This was when she was serving as a mechanic in the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), the women’s branch of the army, and it helps explain the genuine regard she inspired all her life.

From not long after, several formal photographs show her with her husband, Prince Philip, who wears a full admiral’s uniform as his father-in-law had. Kings and emperors have immemorially been portrayed in uniform to emphasize their status as warlords, whether or not they had ever heard the sound of gunfire. An egregious case of the latter was Emperor Wilhelm II, “Kaiser Bill” to the English, whose almost grotesque apparel as a Prussian Kürassier, complete with eagle atop his helmet, was at odds with his lack of military experience. Prince Philip, by contrast, was no “chocolate sailor,” the derisive phrase for those who served behind a desk: in March 1941 he was commended for his conduct as searchlight officer in HMS Valiant at the Battle of Cape Matapan, when the navy routed Mussolini’s forces in a brilliant night action. By the time he died three years ago he was by some way the only spouse of a head of state to have fought in World War II; when the Queen died she was by an even longer way the only surviving head of state to have worn a uniform in that war. 

Then a photographer joined the family. For a time Antony Armstrong Jones—Earl of Snowdon after his ill-fated marriage to Princess Margaret—installed himself as ex officio royal photographer, and took some very good pictures, including a charming one of the very young Prince Charles and Princess Anne in 1956, standing by a mirror and looking at their reflections, and a glamorous shot of Princess Margaret herself in 1967.

As for Queen Elizabeth II, one may confidently say that she is the only person to have been portrayed by Pietro Annigoni, Lucian Freud, and Andy Warhol (he was the one she didn’t sit for), not to mention played on screen by Helen Mirren and Imelda Staunton. Annigoni was among the most fashionable portrait painters of the postwar decades, though his work now seems lifeless, near-photographic likenesses which rarely capture any inner spirit, more suitable for decorating chocolate boxes. In Freud’s odd painting the queen looks as though she’s making a face of disapproval, her crown almost unbalanced on top of her grey curls. Another American provided greatly superior “pourtraictures” of the queen in her later years. Annie Leibovitz seems to have taken over Buckingham Palace and told the queen just what she should sit and do, with fascinating results. They range from a comparatively informal group portrait of the royal family to a thoroughly formal photograph of the queen in her grandest regalia.

Royal Collection Trust/His Majesty King Charles III

Cecil Beaton: The Royal Family at Royal Lodge, 1943

Royal Collection Trust/His Majesty King Charles III

Cecil Beaton: Princess Margaret, 1955

Antony Armstrong-Jones

Antony Armstrong-Jones: Prince Charles and Princess Anne, 1956

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Licensed by DACS, London

Andy Warhol: Reigning Queens (Royal Edition): Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, 1985

What of the new painting of King Charles? It was displayed for a time at the Philip Mould gallery in Pall Mall, on its way to the Drapers’ Hall, where it will repose. A very large canvas, eight-foot-six by six-foot-six, it ostensibly portrays the king arrayed as colonel of the Welsh Guards. Beneath a very good likeness of Charles’s face there is a cascade of red all the way down. In the derisive view of Richard Morrison of the London Times, Charles “seems shrouded in pink candy floss.”

That’s a slightly lurid description, and I must admit I liked the portrait more than I was expecting to. Yeo has at least tried to make it new, in a field where that is anything but easy. There is still a market for formal portrait painting, including Royal portraits, but we can’t really expect even the best painters of our age to emulate the likes of Velasquez, Goya, and Lawrence. The temptation is either toward the traditionalist mediocrity of Annigoni or the whimsy of Freud and Warhol. Yeo’s painting is a very uninstitutional approach to an ancient institution. But then King Charles might say that’s what he’s trying to do himself.