The Portrait

 It seems the nation (well, those who take an interest in such things) is split down the middle on the subject of the recent portrait of King Charles by Jonathan Yeo.

I will come straight out with it - I love it.

The Divine Right of Kings has thankfully disappeared into Antiquity but Queen Elizabeth II was catapulted into her role in a totally different age to the one we live in now.  She tried hard to come across as a 'woman of the people' but I think she sometimes found it difficult.  I think we must realise that however hard we try we can't imagine the life they, the Royal Family, lead.    She was a figurehead and worked jolly hard throughout her life to live up to the standards she had set herself.

King Charles waited a long time to take over her role.   Prestige, money, privilege, trecking about the World always in one's best clothes or worse still Dress Unif orms - the life of a King is not all it is cracked up to be - always on display, always on one's best behaviour (we'll ignore the tussle with the pen), every tiff, every action likely to become headline news if one puts a foot wrong.   And add to this in the case of HM cancer, close family eruptions disturbing the water and a past life that was by no means 'plain sailing.'

I think (whether I believe in having a Royal Family or not) that the King is doing his absolute level best.

Most past Royal Portraits and indeed those of so-called 'important figures' , have been on the whole a bit wooden**.   Holbein's Henry VIII - like many earlier portraits of Kings and Queens = shows nothing at all about character.   It just shouts out loud and clear - I'm the King and don't mess with me - the face shows nothing of what the man is really like.

And here Yeo has given us - standing out so clearly that is is almost painful to see - the man.   His seventy odd years are etched into his face - his years at a hated school,  his unhappy marriage, his struggle to find a role for himself and the sudden transformation of a love for Nature, for wild life, and a marriage to the woman he truly loved.

I think Jonathan Yeo has captured it all so well.   All the King's troubles and family worries have become public knowledge - not an easy burden to bear.    The face of the King in this portrait I think gives true meaning to the phrase 'A picture is worth a thousand words'.   You have only to look at that face to know for certain that for all his money,  all his privileges, he is - like all of us - a Human Being - has lived through all life's ups and downs and weathered them.  

One things is for sure.   Yeo has - in that face - and those hands - shown us the real man - not the king but a man like the rest of us who has suffered 'the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune' and pulled through.   Oh and, by the way, that Monarch butterfly on his right shoulder (I understand suggested by the King himself) is a stroke of genius.

**   I rather think that in the seventies Graham Sutherland's portrait of Winston Churchill was chopped up and burnt by Lady Churchill because looking at it gave Churchill such distress.