King Charles’s portrait faces tough crowd in the age of Instagram and Photoshop

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The world got its first look at a King Charles III portrait Wednesday, and the painting of the monarch in a red uniform on a pink-and-red background by artist Jonathan Yeo has “divided critics,” as they say.

That is a polite way of reporting that some people, with or without degrees in art history, said “Coo, lovely. What a likeness!” while others said he looks like he’s burning in hell or bathed in the blood of colonialism, and why is there a butterfly over his shoulder?

Royal portraits, this one the first to be unveiled since King Charles’s ascension to the throne, do tend to stoke such controversies. Only last month, “critics were divided” over a bronze statue of the late Queen Elizabeth II, dressed in a wide cloak and accompanied by three of her beloved corgis, that was unveiled in Oakham, a town in the East Midlands.

Some felt it was humanizing and accessible; others complained it was undignified, overwhelming the queen with clothing and corgis. The artist, London sculptor Hywel Pratley, said the dogs represent the security and safety of her long reign.

Yeo, who happens to be Britain’s most famous portraitist, has explained that the butterfly in his work, begun while the man was still Prince of Wales, is a reference to King Charles’s environmental commitment but can now read as the symbol of his metamorphosis from prince to king. (I should point out, before you press the comments button, that both these portraits were paid for by private subscription. The red-and-pink King Charles was commissioned by the Drapers’ Company, a historic London guild and now philanthropic agency.)

There was a time when anyone who dared suggest that a royal portrait was undignified, let alone hellish, would have found themselves shorter by a head. Today, royal portraits – and indeed, portraiture in general – just aren’t that important. Monarchs have more reliable ways of being seen, and we all have quicker ways of capturing well-loved faces.

It is easy to forget, in the age of the selfie, that a painted portrait was once a magical thing. Before mirrored glass became cheaply available in the mid 19th-century, only the wealthy would have owned a finely polished piece of metal or lead-backed glass in which they might see their own reflection. The only mechanism to reproduce a face was drawing or painting. The way Hans Holbein (court painter to the Tudors) or Diego Velázquez (who painted Philip IV of Spain from youth to middle age) could depict a recognizable physiognomy using only paint on a flat canvas seemed a god-like talent.

To this day, we praise portrait painters for their ability to produce a likeness – “Yes, you’ve got him,” Queen Camilla is reported to have said to Yeo at the unveiling – but we don’t need them. We have cameras to do their basic job.

So portrait painters (and serious portrait photographers too) rely on stylistic innovation, psychological insight and symbolism to distinguish their work in a crowded field. Yet it is these departures from the most narrow illustration of the subject that seem to inflame the naysayers. Yeo’s Charles wears the red jacket of the Welsh Guards, which blends into a red background, a monochromatic effect the painter has used – with better success – in previous portraits, rendering Idris Elba entirely in shades of brown or Helena Bonham Carter in sepia tones.

His likeness of King Charles isn’t bad but his portrait of his father, the Duke of Edinburgh, is better and his 2014 version of the Duchess of Cornwall, as Queen Camilla was then, is highly successful: a sympathetic image of a sensitive woman in late middle age, taking off her glasses to think a bit. If the brief was to humanize the rival Princess Diana used to call the rottweiler, Yeo did the job admirably.

Once upon a time, royal portraits were commissioned to inspire awe and reverence in those who saw them – probably only select courtiers – as part of a monarch’s larger campaign to be visible to their subjects. Without photographers at the ready, they fought in battles, marched in parades or simply attended the theatre. When Queen Victoria disappeared into mourning, the public became restless, and today visibility is still a major part of the job of a “working royal.” That partly accounts for the massive fuss over the recent disappearance of Catherine, Princess of Wales from public view, initially mysterious, eventually explained as cancer treatment. Lately, the British media keeps noting approvingly that King Charles has returned to public engagements despite his own cancer diagnosis.

Owing to its historical associations with royalty, lineage and wealth, a painted portrait remains a status symbol, but it has little practical or political function in the 21st century. The King must be seen but he doesn’t need a painting to spread word of his vigour. A few engagements, a few photos and videos, and the media will happily do the job. Today, the royal portrait serves only to honour – a tough assignment in the age of Instagram and Photoshop.