ART
A
ccording to the National
Portrait Gallery, the Queen is
“the most portrayed individ-
ual in history”. It’s an extraor-
dinary fact. Think of all the
history-changing individuals
Elizabeth II has out-portrayed — Julius
Caesar, Napoleon, Adolf Hitler, Chair-
man Mao, Marilyn Monroe...
The reasons there are so many por-
traits of her are many and varied. Her
longevity has obviously been crucial.
As we press our lips to the trumpets
and toot our 70 platinum toots most of
us will have lived our lives within her
reign. The Queen has bookended our
existence. She has always been there.
Yet portraits are not like the rings of
a tree, each marking another year of
growth. Portraits are the result of
a process that has more in common
with alchemy than with maths. Some of
the extraordinary plenitude of the
Queen’s imagery is the result of her vin-
tage — but much of it is not. Much of it
has happened for whispery, elusive,
diaphanous reasons.
Since she was a small girl, beaming
from the cigarette cards pressed into
the British fag packet by WD & HOThe camera loved Elizabeth II as if she
were a film star and she loved it back.
But trusting untalented establishment
lackeys to paint her has been a fiasco
Wills, the camera has loved the Queen.
At first it was that Shirley Temple thing
she had. As a child she oozed a bouncy
blonde confidence. Especially when
Princess Margaret was in the shot as
well and Elizabeth could adopt the
presence of a mildly bossy elder sister.
Yet it was in her princess years, when
the cherub of the cigarette cards blos-
somed into the seriously beautiful heir
to the throne, that things really started
to heat up between the Queen and the
camera. Sociologists, historians and
cynics will tell you that these were
already years of exponential growth in
the image industry — new magazines,
new cameras, a new interest in the new.
As an entity, the royal family had
become actively aware of the need to
present a fresh image of itself to its pop-
ulace. Not just in Britain, but in every
corner of the huge pink empire it ruled.
It’s all true. Everybody loves a prin-
cess. But any old princess would not
have emitted the powerful gamma rays
that Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor
emitted when she sat down for the first
time in front of Yousuf Karsh, photogra-
pher of the famous, and began the
series of potent portrayals that chart
the climactic stages of her princessdom.
What Karsh realised immediately is
that this particular princess could have
been a film star. The line of her neck.
The precise bunching of her hair, care-
fully parted, but with a hint of noirishunruliness. The society photographer
Dorothy Wilding saw it too. It was one
of Wilding’s perfect royal profiles, taken
immediately after the accession in 1952,
that became the image repeated on our
national stamps.
Later still, Andy Warhol used one of
the official state likenesses of her as the
basis for a brightly iconic royal screen-
print. From the start, Elizabeth Wind-
sor had something about her that
lenses go giddy over.
So, yes, the camera loved the Queen.
But — and this is where it gets slippery
— she evidently loved it back. This is
not the right occasion for us to begin
nosing about in the enclosed garden of
royal coquettishness, but, as an art
critic, it’s as clear to me as the daylight
in a painting by Christen Kobke that as
a young woman, Elizabeth knew what
she had and was never entirely shy
about putting it out there. She could
smoulder. She could do the half-smile
thing. She could look back at us allur-
ingly over a naked shoulder.
The photographer who recognised
this most precisely was Cecil Beaton. It
started when he was telephoned out of
the blue by Buckingham Palace. At the
time, the years before and after the Cor-
onation, he was the world’s best known
fashion photographer. But a fashion
photographer is not a royal photogra-
pher. Hiring him was an independent
and pointed thing for the Queen to do.With his rococo details, cascading
cloths and bountiful bouquets, Beaton
gave the postwar world the fairytale
princess it desired. When she became
Queen the regalia changed, but not the
mood. For him she was always a mon-
arch of the Cinderella dynasty. What
Beaton knew from the start, with his
fashion training, is that a supermodel
had ascended to the British throne.
I have met her only once, while
making a film about the art in the Royal
Collection. Invited for tea at Bucking-
ham Palace, I was struck by her com-Beauty queen A Cecil Beaton portrait
from 1948; Mitchell & Son’s cigarette
card from 1935; Dorothy Wilding’s
1952 photograph; Pietro Annigoni’s
portrait from 1955; Andy Warhol’s
Queen Elizabeth II (red screenprint)
from Reigning Queens (Royal Edition)
1985 (highlights in The Art of
Literature exhibition at Christie’s, part
of London Now, Jun 6-Jul 14); Chinwe
Chukwuogo-Roy’s 2002 portrait for
the Golden Jubilee. Right: Peter
Blake’s commission for Radio TimesHISTORY’S
WALDEMAR
JANUSZCZAK
For Cecil Beaton she
was always a monarch of
the Cinderella dynasty
ALAMYCECIL BEATON/CAMERA PRESS NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY4 29 May 2022