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It is tempting to see Her Majesty’s apparent displeasure as a reflection of the monarchy’s ambiguous standing in Australia, where republican sentiment – although on the wane, according to opinion polls – is far more common than back in the old country. But Australian voters rejected a republic in 1999, and so long as the Queen has a constitutional role she gets her head on the bank notes.
Yet this less than authoritative image surely reveals an ambivalence, a hesitance in vaunting the regal visage.
That hesitance reflects a difficulty in portraying the monarch in a democratic age that has blighted representations of Queen Elizabeth II throughout her reign. Ages that were more authoritarian could afford to be much blunter in their portrayals of kings and queens.
Portraits of Charles II, for instance, made no attempt to hide his thick eyebrows, poor complexion and almost satyr-like ugliness. Yet these unflattering images do not reveal republican discontent. On the contrary, Charles was so revered that people queued to be cured of scrofula by him – the king supposedly had a magic healing touch.
Not even the most passionate monarchist claims that Elizabeth II has a magic healing power. The modern monarchy is a decoration of the state, not a real ruler, and definitely not a mystical authority. So, portraitists have to work hard to pretend it is all the things it is not. Images can create a charismatic spell that would be ridiculed if you put it into words.
Cecil Beaton’s coronation photographs of the Queen revel in medieval splendour, succumbing to delusions of mystical monarchy. Beaton’s picture works because it gives a camp hint that all this is a game, but one false step and a flattering portrait becomes a plain weird one; take Pietro Annigoni’s 1969 painting, which tries to make the Queen look like a military leader and ends up being slightly creepy.
It is a fine line between lending a modern monarch the magic of regal myth and telling obvious lies. As the Queen has got older that balance has got harder. The young woman who was crowned in 1953 was much easier to fit into fairytale fictions of royalty.
More and more portraitists have tried to show the “real” Queen as she has aged, with less than happy results. Lucian Freud is one of the greatest British painters of all time, but his portrait of an unhappy Queen uneasily wearing the crown was not exactly a popular success. Profound realism or epic royal fail?
Probably the latter, because just as a modern Queen is not a magically healing Charles II, she is not King Lear either, and Freud probably took the job of portraying her too seriously. So did Dan Llywelyn Hall, a young Welsh painter who was accused of portraying the Queen like a Spitting Image puppet in 2013. These artists have taken on an impossible challenge.
Brought up on a image of the Queen that was invented more than 60 years ago, we just won’t accept honest depictions of age as proper royal portraits.
It actually took Australia’s Rolf Harris to paint a portrait of the older Elizabeth II that won widespread popular acclaim – a soft-focus homage to the commonwealth’s granny.
But we don’t talk about that any more.
guardian
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