Saturday, August 10, 2024, 1:05 p.m.
The most famous portrait of 2024 is the one published by Kensington Palace on March 1. It was the first image of the Princess of Wales since the abdominal operation she had in January. Catherine posed sitting and smiling with her three children in front of the supposed camera of her husband, Prince William. Five international news agencies removed the photograph hours later.
In the age of mobile phone cameras and millions of selfies, it caused a huge scandal that the Princess of Wales had manipulated her image and that of her family. Days later she appeared before the BBC cameras to confess that she is receiving treatment for cancer. Imaginative people had already given her up for dead, due to the silence of the Palace and the doctored photo.
Kate Middleton has not given up her love of photography or publishing it. In June, the Palace distributed another family photo to celebrate William’s 42nd birthday. Father and children were jumping on the sand at a beach. This week, the photo was of her eldest son, George, on his 11th birthday. Taylor Swift posted a selfie that day with her fans, George and Charlotte, and her father.
Members of the British royal family award shops with badges of recognition that they are regular customers and take on the role of patrons of all kinds of associations and bodies. Catherine’s chosen patronages include the Royal Photographic Society and the National Portrait Gallery.
There is a huge collection of kings and princes in this museum. Its oldest portrait is that of Henry VII, the first monarch of the medieval Tudor dynasty. The fascination with that time is well-known. The successor, Henry VIII, broke with the Pope of Rome because he would not let him divorce another Catherine, this one of Aragon and daughter of the Catholic Monarchs.
The current exhibition on the six wives of Elizabeth I’s father is considered superb by most critics. It is also a hit with the public, who can culminate their fascination with that time by going to the nearby West End to see ‘Six, the musical’, in which the six divorced, rejected, murdered… by Henry VIII form a musical band.
A mosaic of Amy Winehouse and a portrait of Shakespeare rub shoulders with Prince William’s family photos
The portraits of contemporary monarchs are different. There are many of Elizabeth II in the museum’s archives. Now hanging on the walls of the portrait museum is the typical gallery of Andy Warhol’s quick silkscreens. The image of King Charles III is a photograph on the cover of the American magazine ‘Time’. And Catherine posed on her 40th birthday for Paolo Roversi, who has photographed models and actresses for the Pirelli calendar.
The world has changed, but the mission of the Portrait Museum remains to “tell the story of the United Kingdom through portraiture, and to advocate that art form internationally.” Thomas Carlyle, essayist and historian, championed its creation. “I have found that portraiture is like a candle, which enables biographies to be read for the first time, and to be interpreted in a human way,” he wrote in 1854.
Masterful story
The museum, which displays the only live portrait of William Shakespeare and a mosaic of media images of the late singer Amy Winehouse, has the world’s largest collection of portraits, some 311,000 paintings, sculptures, miniatures, works on paper, drawings and prints.
Mark Stuart-Smith, artist and art teacher, who recently published his book ‘Juan Muñoz, the politics of silence’, about the Spanish artist, says: “Images have always been created as a means of social communication and expression, and that is already clear even in the Altamira paintings. There is no fundamental separation between history and images.”
His favourite portraits? “In the early 1990s I spent time looking at Rembrandt’s self-portrait at the age of 63. I wasn’t really interested in how he had achieved such an astonishing painting. I just wanted to be in his presence.” And he lists some of his other favourite works: “Of all the Velázquez portraits, perhaps the ‘Portrait of a Girl’, which is in the Hispanic Society of America.”
This is followed by ‘Portrait of his cousin Gerda Boehm’ (1961), by Frank Auerbach, and ‘Double bind’, by Juan Muñoz, which “reflects the artist’s early years in London in the 1970s, where his older brother, Vicente, sought relief from his mental illness and anguish. For the installation, Muñoz took the mask of his brother’s face in a tormented expression. All but one of the numerous figures inhabiting the installation had the appearance of Vicente. The only other figure was Muñoz himself, laughing.”
“As a portrait of two brothers it is an unfathomable and disturbing private joke,” he continues. “Look also at ‘Las Meninas’: it is the portrait of an artist surrounded by the attributes and machinery of representation, including here his model, his brother.”
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