by Alex Wells
As a Californian, and therefore American, institution, it should go without saying that The Footnote believes monarchy to be a stupid thing and that therefore royal portraits are stupid things and that the people who paint them are toadies and traitors to democracy. But they keep getting painted anyway—and we are, above all, a news organization.
The news is that Jonathan Yeo has produced an official portrait of King Charles III that strongly suggests he’s burning in a Hell made of blood. It was unveiled yesterday.
The piece has been executed in an unoriginal and deeply mid 20th-century style evolved to show off the fact that the artist did actually get A’s in figure drawing while having enough thick-brush abstract flourish that the painting can’t be directly compared to much better and earlier works in the realist tradition to which it is nevertheless slavishly indebted. It is in a word very bad.
Nobody expects these kinds of paintings to be good—they are meant to serve the subject, not the audience. They are PR exercises. While many have seen the infernal portrait as somewhat subversive the fact is it actually stands in a long line of paintings more-or-less in this style going at least as far back as Graham Sutherland’s now-destroyed 1954 painting of Winston Churchill. It shares many of that painting’s stylistic hallmarks, including the clothes melding with the room and the flesh rendered in that post-Kokoschka way that makes it look like the artist was so closely staring at the face that they couldn’t understand the overall effect of the light on the form, thus turning the visage into some sort of aerial view of a desert bombardment or close-up of meat under some pitiless FDA-inspection lamp.
If you didn’t know any better you might think the Yow portrait is simply later work from Sutherland. The major difference is that while the latter made Churchill look like he and his room were composed of green shit, the former makes the King and his room look like they are made of red shit.
Is it good that these paintings are so bad? Does it make the monarchy more likely to fall? Does it kick against imperialism, idolatry, pomp? The answer is obviously “no.” Official portraitists have been trying to embarrass the heads of state that pay for their villas for centuries but the fact that this portrait—and by extension the monarchy that commissioned it—even still exists in our century proves that the tactic does nothing. The only difficult thing achieved here is that Charles’ apparent tolerance for the work has made him seem, however briefly, interesting.
Image: The UK Crown, of course