‘I was after mystique rather than power’: artist Jonathan Yeo on his radical portrait of King Charles

Jonathan Yeo's portrait of King Charles III - PA

How do you paint a modern monarch? Jonathan Yeo, in his life portrait of King Charles commissioned on behalf of the Drapers’ Company and unveiled today at Buckingham Palace has achieved this – and it is fair to say, it has been long in the coming.

Yeo began the commission as long ago as 2021, but a coronation and a bout of ill health (for Yeo) intervened. The depiction of a prince wearing his uniform of colonel of the Welsh Guards – the Drapers’ affiliated regiment – thus evolved into the first painted portrait of Charles as monarch for which he has formally sat.

Yeo, 53, has forged a reputation as one of the UK’s leading figurative artists. Known for both traditional and experimental portraiture, sitters include Sir David Attenborough, Nicole Kidman, Damien Hirst, Tony Blair and Rupert Murdoch.

A reigning king was a first for Yeo, however – and perhaps the unexpected period of deliberation and transition over three years, across four sittings, helped where most have failed. For what has been unveiled is a monumental, twice-life-size portrait of the Head of State that is artistically and psychologically progressive.

Such an achievement is a great rarity. For more than a century, there has been an almost unresolvable paradox in the depiction of monarchy. Despite the unabating demand for formal life portraits from many hundreds of institutions with which the sovereign is connected, when it comes to paintings from life, successfully combining artistic innovation with the constraints of protocol has proved almost insoluble.

It is easy to see why. Official royal portraiture requires both a clear likeness and some form of acknowledgement of the ‘mystery’ of monarchy born of tradition and history. If it is to succeed as a ‘modern’ artwork as well, it needs also to push boundaries and challenge convention – or, to use the modern term, to be disruptive. These are conflicting ideals.

This conundrum is not new. The then director of the National Portrait Gallery, Roy Strong, in his valuably indiscreet diaries records discussing this potentially unresolvable conflict with Laurence Gowing of the Tate in the late late 1960s. Gowing advised him to give up the idea of seeking a mainstream artist to paint the Queen, gallingly adding that the very few good painters who could make “a really remarkable picture” would not accept the commission

Photography, being more ephemeral and instant, and relying less on the need for multiple sittings, has fared better. Cecil Beaton, with a fashion photographer’s eye, helped create a fairytale younger Queen for what journalists described as the “new Elizabethan age” in 1953. Later on Annie Leibovitz produced a haunting series of the more venerable monarch in palace settings at the commencement of this century. And a serendipitous outtake with her eyes closed by hologramist Chris Levine proved a runaway success.

The artist Jonathan Yeo

But despite many commendably well-executed conventional artworks, almost no formal portrait – that is, an official painting commissioned by an institution with which the monarch is associated – has been able successfully to combine necessary deference with artistic edginess.

In 2001 the late, great Lucian Freud – our internationally celebrated contrarian portraitist – was granted 10 sittings by the Queen to produce something culturally defining. The result was a beautifully crafted, but miserable-faced portrait that said more about Freud’s complex response to the establishment than the character and presence of the Queen.

So how does Yeo achieve for our new monarch what was apparently impossible during the reign of the late Queen?

To begin with, his larger than life new image appears to verge on the abstract – the background would not look out of place beside a Rothko or Pollock. The King’s body partly emerges from a storm of red strokes within an upright rectangular block, his red Guard’s uniform blending seamlessly into the background, thus camouflaging the military impact. Gone are formal tropes of drapery, or flashes of gilded ornamentation in favour of something altogether more dynamic and emotionally expressive

“I wanted to open up his character to other interpretations” Yeo, who is a personal friend, told me when he first showed it to me a few weeks ago. “The military is not the thing we will know him for. I was after mystique rather than power – to throw in a bit of fairy dust if you like. To that end, I also changed the tone of red to something more artificial and fantastical”

Using his characteristic ‘non-finito’ approach, Yeo has included the required galaxy of medals and royal insignia….but left them semi-unpainted beneath a red glaze. The King’s military and royal qualifications are thus faithfully incorporated, but do not dominate.

Instead, Charles’s face and familiarly chubby hands emerge as if from a different realm. His expression is compassionate, thoughtful, and characteristically intense. He plays King but remains human. In expression alone Yeo appears to have cracked that elusive requirement of combining idealism with realism.

“As a portrait artist, you get this unique opportunity to spend time with, and get to know a subject, so I decided to go for broke, minimise the visual distractions, and try for an expression of the person underneath” Yeo recalls.

And like the best type of artistic symbols, the butterfly entering stage right (the King’s idea) can work on multiple levels. It’s called a monarch – emotive also given its rarity and endangered status. Does it represent the metamorphosed prince? The fragility of life? While acknowledging all these interpretations, Yeo’s other intentions with it were more prosaic.

“I wanted a light-touch means to refer to the environmental causes the King has championed most of his life. Happily, it was also able to work as a compositional device to contrast with the military steeliness of the uniform and sword – it helped soften the impact.”

Like the cat who could look at the King, Yeo will be recognised for having found a means of introducing a degree of radicalism into an ancient and rigid genre. By combining novel dynamism in brushstroke, colour and design with a portraitist’s empathy, he has succeeded in conjuring the mysticism of anointed, dynastic power together with the human predicament that underlies it. This is genuinely exciting in the history of royal portraiture, and will give the Draper’s much to discuss and be thankful for.

Following the unveiling of the portrait at Buckingham Palace, the portrait will travel to the Philip Mould Gallery, London, where it will be on display for one month, from May 16 until June 14, Mondays to Fridays, from 9.30am-5.30pm

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