If the basic job of a work of art is to be interesting, as I think it is, then Jonathan Yeo’s new portrait of the King accomplished that admirably. No sooner had an image of this big canvas been released to the public than it sparked a million memes. What did it mean, people wondered, that His Majesty’s face emerged from a great abstract field of rose and crimson? Was it a nod to the blood-soaked legacy of empire? A secret signal of some sort of satanic conspiracy theory? A portentous meditation on the blood royal? An anxious reflection on the King’s recent illness?
Was it a nod to the blood-soaked legacy of empire?
It has been, to say the least, controversial. Monarchists and republicans alike have taken a close and lively interest in it. They have looked – and they have kept on looking. My own first reaction was, like that of many people, dismay. I thought: what on earth are all these red splodges? I wondered if our man had kicked a tin of paint over the canvas halfway through the process and decided to make the best of it and front it out. But I looked, and I kept on looking. I’ve come to the view that Yeo has done something rather wonderful.
It’s a tough row to hoe, producing an official portrait of a monarch. It is an inescapably traditional form. Nobody will thank you for an avant-garde collage that doesn’t make the King look like the King. At the same time to pastiche the dull, dutiful style of a previous century will be to produce something that barely lives at all. Here, with an echo perhaps of Graham Sutherland, Mr Yeo has split the difference expertly.
The painting is lovingly, fastidiously, expertly figurative. The King’s face is a marvel: the gaze direct, the expression composed but essentially unreadable. The years show on it. It couldn’t be a photograph, but it carries the precision of information that a photograph would carry. That nose! He has it to the life. And the effect of the almost Rothkoish swirl of colour behind him is to focus the viewer’s attention on the face.
Compositionally, it is deftly balanced top to bottom. His Majesty’s sausagey fingers, clasped loosely, hand over hand, at the top of his sword, rhyme in colour with his face. Not all of the action is in the top half of the picture. And they, too, almost more than the worry-lines on the forehead, give you information about the man. The pink-brown flesh-tones pop from the background. The King, here, is metonymised to a calm, weatherbeaten face and a well-used pair of hands.
Interviewed in the Sunday Times yesterday, Mr Yeo was asked about the decisions he made in painting the portrait. What was striking about his remarks was how little pretentiousness there was in them. He didn’t advance, which would have itself been flattening, a symbolic reason for all that red. The monarch butterfly, hovering above the monarch’s right shoulder, is said to symbolise ‘metamorphosis and rebirth’ – which most of us could have made out easily enough. But the great wash of colour from which the figure emerges was arrived at by feel. Yeo talked not of grand symbolism, but of the technical challenges to the painting.
He’d been told that he needed to paint His Majesty in the bright red uniform of the Welsh Guards – and that at once presented him with a compositional challenge. ‘I thought, the red will really distract.’ You don’t, to put it crudely, want a great vermilion block of colour making His Majesty’s chest the most eyecatching thing in the portrait – and so short of persuading the Welsh Guards to change the colour of their tunics, a solution had to be found. The solution he hit on was, effectively, to blend the uniform into the background by making the background the same colour. He wonders, now, whether his own recent heart attack affected the decision, but in the moment, it was instinct: ‘It was just: I like this colour.’
He had the same problem with the King’s medals: ‘The more I painted the medals in, the more that was the first thing you saw because they were so shiny. I didn’t want it to be about that, but they had to be there somewhere. I would put them in — and then it would be too much — and I would rub them away. It was push and pull.’ He says he spent more time painting the medals to avoid them drawing the viewer’s eye than he did painting the King’s face to achieve the opposite effect. There is, almost literally, the art that conceals art.
And yet when you do look at the painting, closely, those reds are also interesting: their thick texture, the scuffing, the notes of a darker colour (there are patches of something almost black on the top left, arcing up from the butterfly and around the King’s head), and the way in which the details of the uniform are distinctly legible even as they emerge from the abstract background. There’s just a very great deal to look at in it and respond to. The uniform is, and is not, a part of the background. It’s a human face and human hands in a pattern of abstracts – which is, after all, one way of looking at the institution of monarchy itself.
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