http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/stamps-to-high-art-queen-elizabeth-ii-is-the-uks-public-face
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Queen Elizabeth is out and about
touring Britain this spring to mark her Diamond Jubilee. And as always, wherever
she travels she invariably wears an outfit in some brilliant hue. For her first
stop in Leicester it was a lurid pink and black affair.
Royal biographer Robert Hardman says
she once said she wore bright colours because: “I can
never wear beige because nobody will know who I am.”
The Monarch was obviously joking.
This year Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor has been on the throne for 60 years.
At the age of 86 she is surely the world’s most recognisable woman.
The changing face of the British
monarch in the 60 years, marked this June by the Diamond Jubilee of her
Coronation, is the focus of a major exhibition at London’s National Portrait
Gallery – “The Queen: Art and Image” until mid October.
Paul Moorhouse curator of the show
says that while Queen Elizabeth is: “Familiar to millions around the globe, for
the man or the woman in the street, she is seen from afar.
“The impressions of her in the
minds of ordinary people are not based on reality, but on innumerable visual
representations. Her thoughts and opinions on many subjects remain
undisclosed.”
And, while many believe that the
Mona Lisa is the world’s most reproduced artwork, that honour actually belongs
to a little picture of Queen Elizabeth by an artist called Arnold Machin.
He is hardly a household name, yet
at the time of writing more than 220 billion copies of his image used on
British postage stamps have been produced in the 45 years since it was first introduced.
And the Queen’s face has also adorned
every UK coin since she came to he throne and all banknotes since 1960.
Jubilee year is jammed with events
with a range of other exhibitions showing off some of the tsunami of royal images
created over 60 year by artists, photographers and cartoonists.
Queen Elizabeth was born on April 21st
1926 when television was an experiment. She has since become the first mass
media monarch. She now has a Facebook presence, her Christmas broadcasts are
also seen on YouTube and she even has an indirect Twitter link.
Her visibility started with a
childhood trickle of officially sanctioned and sedate photographs and paintings
of her with her sister Margaret at play or in posed portraits by such society
snappers as Cecil Beaton. The first known painting was by a Hungarian artist
called Philip de Laszlo of the Queen at the age of seven.
But early in Elizabeth’s childhood,
her uncle King Edward The Eighth abdicated over his love for the American
divorcee Wallis Simpson. This made her father George the King and Elizabeth his
heir. As Queen she has since witnessed an era of dramatic change including the
transformation of the British Empire into a Commonwealth and her own role as ruler
become an ever more symbolic one.
Today royalty still exerts a huge
public fascination and there is great public affection for the Queen. This has
prompted amiable parodies in satirical TV shows such as the puppet show
Spitting Image, film portrayals including Helen Mirren’s Oscar winning
portrayal in The Queen and innumerable newspaper cartoons.
The avant-garde has sometimes been
crueller. Graphic artist Jamie Reid’s image of her with a safety pin through
her nose became a defining image of Punk when used by The Sex Pistols and the
extreme conceptual artist Genesis P.Orridge received a suspended jail sentence for
juxtaposing her face with pornographic images.
Even some established portraitists
have upset the nation. After Lucien Freud – grandson of the founder of
psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud and acclaimed as Britain’s greatest modern
portrait painter – portrayed her in 2000, one critic said the resulting image,
included in the NPG show, was so ugly Freud should be imprisoned in the Tower
of London. Another said it made her look like a Royal Corgi that had suffered a
stroke.
And all the while representations of
the Queen have proliferated – from family snaps and official portraits by such
Royal relatives as Lord Snowdon and the Earl of Litchfield to today’s paparazzi
pictures for the tabloid press and popular magazines.
Every British embassy, Consulate
and High Commission around the world displays an official portrait. The latest,
created a few weeks ago is by the photographer John Swannell. He says: “I’ve photographed all the
top members of the Royal Family over the years. Princess Margaret was the only
one I didn’t do. It’s been good fun.
They’re very easy going. I had to shoot the Queen Mother, the Queen,
Prince Charles and Prince William all together, and they said, ‘You realize
when you shoot this it’ll be the most important photograph since Queen Victoria
was photographed with her family?’ I said, ‘Oh great, how long have I got to do
it?’, and they said ‘10 minutes’! You’re allocated a time slot because they’re
so busy, and you’ve really got to work fast.”
Another painted portrait, included
in the National Portrait Gallery show, is by the Florentine-born artist Pietro
Annigoni. It is said
to be one of the Queen’s favourite paintings of herself and she liked it so
much that she purchased it in 2006 for an undisclosed sum. Annigoni said: “ I
did not want to paint her as a film star. I saw her as a monarch, alone in the
problems of her responsibility.”
But portraiture is no longer
limited to painting and photography. In 2004 holographic artist Chris Levene
was commissioned by the Island of Jersey to create a portrait to mark 800 years
of allegiance to the crown. It has just been given the National Portrait
Gallery.
Two sittings were involved using a
high-resolution cam, a 3D data scanner and a standard medium format camera. The
resulting and most publicised image is startling – showing the Queen with her
eyes closed.
Levene says: “The Queen had a great
knowledge of photography – by the time we had finished I had a genuine sense of
warmth for her. She is a quite extraordinary lady. As a model she has done many
sittings and she is really radiant.”
But for all of these billions of
images, how just how much do we really know of the Queen? She never gives
interviews and the artists and photographers who’ve created portraits from life
are dutifully tight lipped about any conversations in the studio. A familiar facade
conceals a very private personality.
The closest recent portraitists
have come to spilling the beans on conversations during the work in progress sessions
was the Australian born TV Presenter turned artist Rolf Harris. After he finished
a painting in 2008 he said that The Queen had confided: "I'm only too happy to be sitting absolutely
motionless, doing nothing."
