Portraits of Queen Elizabeth II: The Artists’ Challenges

(title whooshing)- When Professor Simon Thurley, Former Provost of Gresham, asked me to do a talk about the Queen for this series,"Portraits and Power, I immediately agreed, given a lifelong career in British art and a particular interest in historical portraits, it sounded enticing. The enormity of the challenge and possible unwisdom of taking it on hit me a couple of months later. It's worth being reminded of what that fine historian and former chair of the National Portrait Gallery, David Cannadine, once said about our greatly loved monarch,"She is probably the most visually depicted and represented individual ever to have existed across the entire span of human history."(audience murmuring) A daunting task of iconography became significantly less so when I decided to narrow it down to portraits that I find most fascinating. These are formal portraits, photographed or painted, for which the Queen actually sat and engaged in a direct communication with the artist. In my experience, the eyewitness account has consistently proved to be more authoritative and compelling than from a secondary source. It's certainly a view shared by historical institutions, including the National Portrait Gallery. And although, Angela Kelly, the Queen's Personal Assistant and Senior Dresser, has revealed that one of the Queen's most secret wishes was to pose with her hands in her pockets,(audience laughs) nor will I dwell on the unofficial portraits, single, family, or couple, which undoubtedly have appealed and validity too. Instead, I shall be talking about formal life portraits of Elizabeth after she had become Queen that were actually part of her day job. These are works commissioned by institutions for which she was a figurehead, army regiments, livery companies, charities that had a strong expectation upon the portraitist to produce something appropriately iconic. And photographs and paintings that she and her advisors commissioned for special occasions such as birthdays, jubilees, and overseas tours. In all, since coming to the throne, I calculate about 412 formal sittings, but there must have been many more. And I'll be looking at the ways in which these artists approached their task, what these images tell us about the expectations of their time, and how, in varying degrees, they all connect to intriguing traditions in wider art history. The logistical issues faced by any traveling portraitist, and there are a few here in the room, can be problematic, but for the royal sitting, they are terrifying. The Yellow Drawing Room, some of you will know it, at Buckingham Palace, the favored principle location, was for some portraitists an artistic chamber of horrors. Setting up an easel or tripod in this overly ornate and other-worldly environment was challenged enough for what might be, for better or for worse, one of the defining portraits of an entire career. Then there is the issue of time. And as an artist was particularly privileged, the length of a sitting was not very long, two or perhaps three sittings of 50 minutes for a painter, especially in the later decades. A photographer might get as little as half an hour. This restriction certainly frustrated some to the point of failure. For them all, careful planning was required as well as the occasional stroke of good fortune. And most painters made up for the lack of time with working photos taken during the sittings that they could then use back at the studio. In addition to these practical problems, we should also consider the emotional ones. Inevitably, many artists were nervous when they first met the Queen. On the other hand, all the ones I've spoken to and read about say she was a model sitter by nature, accommodating, interested, conscientious, chatty, and humorous. As the photographer Annie Leibovitz put it,"It was her duty. She totally gave herself over to the process, to the photographer, or the artist, or the painter, to use their creativity and their imagination." At the risk of staging the obvious, the frisson of the encounter surely goes to the heart of what defines a royal portrait, the depiction of the "Royal Presence." How do you convey the ineffable qualities of the head of state? The Monarch's position derives from a combination of birth, God, at least that's the traditional view, and what is for a modern democratic society, a strange notional gift, the royal prerogative. Although in practice this is rarely tested, the Monarch has the unique power to enact things like dissolution of Parliament or declaration of war. Inevitably, this creates a unique iconographical challenge. Empathize for a moment with the quandaries and contradictions facing the portraitist who is first ushered into the royal presence, apart from capturing a recognizable lightness, where an earth are they supposed to start? Symbolic objects, backgrounds, and outfits are the easy bit, but how can they express the spirit of a person who is both crowned Monarch and servant of her subjects, who symbolizes and stands as figurehead to the nation and Commonwealth, but also as comforter of her people, who represents solid continuity, but also aims for progress and enlightened change? Someone who is one of us, but clearly not one of us, who is both ordinary and utterly extraordinary. How in a single physical image are all these abstract ideas portrayable? For the purpose of this talk, I've selected a number of portraits that I feel succeeded in this high-wire act. They captured Elizabeth's persona as it changed and distilled her magisterial mystery. And now let me explain how they did it. The portraits I want to talk about seem to me to fall into three categories, divided by age. The first category includes two portraits of the young newly crowned Elizabeth. They were made in 1953 and 1955 respectively and are amongst the best known and most influential of all. Cecil Beaton's Coronation photograph, and what we call "the first Annigoni" The second category, which I'm now calling the Middle Ages, takes us from the 70s to the 90s, and demonstrates a democratizing change of mood. This comprises portraits by the two Michaels, Noakes and Leonard. And the third category reveals what I call "the Venerable Queen," powerful pictures from the penultimate decades of her reign. These include Freud, Levine, and Leibovitz, the latter to being the most successful. Just a little flash of what's to come with Freud, but let's start with a son of a wealthy timber merchant, whose nanny, when he was a child, gave him a Kodak 3A camera to play with. He would be the first to pull off this artistic balancing act of capturing the new Queen's emerging regal persona and her deep magisterial mystery. Cecil Beaton was an ideal amalgam for the job. Fashion photographer and renowned designer of costume, theater, and pageants, as well as artist, interior designer, and much more besides. A genius at evoking the past in the mode of the present. He took royal portraiture to a new level with a series of images at Buckingham Palace on the 2nd of June, 1953. And I've chosen this as the most representative, an image with which you will be familiar. The 27-year-old Queen had just returned home from the ceremonies of the Coronation, which culminated in a three-hour-service at Westminster Abbey, watched by an unprecedented television audience of 20 million, then that was a lot. Despite what must have been a grueling day, the Queen was clearly up for playing her new role. Beaton deployed his theatrical genius by commissioning a painting of the Henry VII Lady Chapel at Westminster, which he then enlarged photographically. This was placed in the Green Drawing Room at Buckingham Palace, and the Queen duly sat before it. Painted backdrops had been used from the earliest days of photography, supplying a sort of form of instant theater. And for Beaton, it gave the composition, a comfortably regal atmosphere in preparation for his next trick. With a nod to Hollywood and a fashion photographer's boldness assisted by colleague from "Vogue," his master stroke was to place a huge 1000 watt bulb behind the Queen's head. It was both extraordinary and transformative in creating a dramatic burnt out effect. The visage of the new monarch emerges with almost supernatural clarity.(page rustles) Beaton was also steeped in historical portraiture. He once attended a pageant dressed as a self-portrait of Thomas Gainsborough. It's clear to me that he must have been familiar with George Hayter's Coronation portrait of the 19-year-old Queen Victoria of 1838. A young woman weighed down with glittering regalia, Hayter came up with a compositional device of both heightening and lightning the composition by having the Queen's septer pointing heavenwards at an 80 degree angle. The confection of reality and fantasy was a sight for sore eyes in austerity Britain. Society was still bruised from the war. Bacon, butter, sugar, and eggs were still rationed. The Cold War had begun in earnest. On the radio that night, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, at his portentous best, described the Queen as,"The gleaming figure whom Providence has brought to us in times when the present is hard and the future veiled." Beaton's image crystallized what the press started calling"the New Elizabethan era." Beaton went on to produce many more beautiful studio images throughout the middle years of the Queen's reign. And I could devote an entire lecture to those alone, but other portraits are beckoning. It was now up to someone to do the equivalent of Beaton in paint. It came two years later thanks to a commission by a board of fishmongers. The result so thrilled the public that when it was first exhibited, you'd have had to jostle with crowds ten deep at the Royal Academy to see it. In recognition of their royal charter and to mark the completion of restoration works at their Hall, the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers in the city of London commissioned the Milan-born Pietro Annigoni to portray the 29-year-old Queen. Annigoni seductively combined old master technology with modern allure. Particularly good with young subjects, he'd become something of an international star. His work frequently showing at London leading commercial galleries. The Fishmongers turned to him because they could find no British artist of similar stature. As a requirement for his technique, and again, he persuaded the Queen to grant a notable 15 sittings, although he'd actually asked for 30. It appears though to have been enough. The transformative power of Annogoni's creation endures to this day. Many people still regard it as the zenith of the Queen's painted iconography. The question is how did he do it? Annigoni painted this in the archaic medium of quick-drying tempera. That is, pigment mixed with egg yolk and applied directly onto the paper rather than canvas, which is then laid onto a support beneath. This gave it a smooth, flawless finish, reminiscent of Early Renaissance panel painting. A dark blue figure silhouetted against an idealized landscape with a low skyline is suffused in warm light. This was a clear homage to the founding giants of the Italian Renaissance, like Raphael and Leonardo. It was brilliantly appetite for the subject. Annigoni imbued the office of sovereign with the mysticism of continuity, rafting the viewer back to the birth of royal and religious easel painting in Europe. Annigoni was also a master at infusing his subjects with very modern, filmic, sex appeal. So successful, in fact, that later in his career, he had more women's subjects than he could cope with. For the face of Windsor, he pulled out all the stops. The observer called the painting smooth and meretricious, but the public loved it for it seemed to deliver the dream of the new Elizabethan age. The royal family, according to Annogoni's memoirs, felt the same. Princess Margaret even complimented Annigoni's rendering of her sister's mouth, a feature she said that usually provided great difficulty for portraitists.(audience laugh) But what about the broader characterization, the pose, the garments, the way the Queen's eyes linger on the middle distance? To me, these aspects are the most compelling. Annigoni claimed her gaze was evoking her time as a child looking out of the palace window onto the Mall. Personally, I have to disagree. It looks to me more like a stock facial formula employed by Titian and others for male dignitaries. The middle class, sorry, the middle-distance gaze of detached authority and political power. See this comparison to Titian Charles V. This reading is further underpinned by her attire. The Queen is wearing the formal clothes of the Order of the Garter, most notably the cape. Originally, an outdoor garment of action known as "the mantle," Annigoni gives it a radical and ingenious new spin. He makes no attempt to show the underlying dress or to include jewelry as, for example, was done for her aunt, Queen Mary, in her Garter portrait. With a theatrical flourish, her mantle becomes her. In so doing, Annigoni effectively steers the new Queen's appearance into something more appropriate for a post-war era. Her modishly short hair adds to the effect. An informed public may also have clock references to the caped, solitary figures of Wellington and Napoleon as portrayed in popular battlefield prints. This was more marshal and heroic than any artist would've dared to do with a young Queen Victoria. With the trope of the all-covering mantle, to which we shall return, Annigoni introduced a more modernist, gender-leveling image of sovereignty, and he did it with stealth, using the language of the Renaissance. We now moved to the 1960s and find a Britain suffering a sharp decline in the standard of society portraiture. The form had fallen from favor. The few artists that were drawn to the genre couldn't really hack it. Before the Second World War, society portraiture had been riding high with the likes of Lavery, Orpen, De Lazlo. But now the avantgarde had taken hold and abstraction dominated the art world. In a Britain coming to terms with a loss of empire, the feudal glamor that underpinned the language of society portraiture was beginning to feel irrelevant. Amid the momentous social and cultural change of the time, attitudes to monarchy also changed. The brightness of the "Faerie Queene" had unquestionably dimmed. In 1957, the hereditary peer Lord Altrincham, shown here, a man, in fact, I met before he died, dared to observe that Elizabeth's formal style of delivery sounded like "a priggish schoolgirl and a captain of the hockey team."(audience laugh) Two months later, the popular journalist Malcolm Muggeridge was banned from the BBC for suggesting that the tedious adulation of the royal family was bad for them, the public, and for the institution of monarchy. But they were only saying openly what some were now privately beginning to think, that the Queen was out of touch, becoming constitutionally irrelevant. Such sentiments hardly threatened the Crown, but they seemed to have persuaded the Queen and her advisors that something had to change. In 1958, the custom of presenting debutantes to the Queen was dropped. This was seen as a significant move away from elitism. And later that same year, she forsook the invisibility of her Christmas broadcaster on radio and addressed the nation on television instead, where she remained. So, what kind of imagery could capture the spirit of this new age of social mobility? In the previous century, Queen Victoria was almost entirely known by the painted, printed, or contrived photographic studio portrait. The second Elizabethan age, on the other hand, demanded greater access and informality underpinned by photographic and cinematic technology. This tastefully relaxed family photograph partly answered the need, and as a genre could be released on special occasions such as birthdays and anniversaries. They came, these type of photographs, most memorably from the trusted inner circle of Lord Snowdon and Patrick Lichfield. This studiedly informal family album shot was published at Christmas 1971 and was probably Lichfield's greatest success. It is in fact three separate shots stitched together, and if you look at it, it makes you a little bit dizzy. It's contrived informality puts me in mind of early 18th century conversation pieces by Hogarth and others. Or is it the ultimate image, to quote Prince Harry, for I am, "one very large, very ancient, very dysfunctional family."(audience laugh) Meanwhile, the unstoppably potent medium of television had been deployed in a desire to create a thoroughly modern image. In 1968, the Palace seized a full-blown PR opportunity. It decided to allow the royal family to be filmed for an entire year for a groundbreaking 90-minute fly-on-the-wall documentary about the Queen's life. The Palace retained full editorial control, but "Royal Family," as it was called, but royal family, as it was called, It was broadcast in June, 1969 on both BBC and ITV and drew an audience of 38 million in this country including myself, aged 10, and 350 million worldwide. The wisdom of letting in a film crew is still debated, but at the time, the general reaction was overwhelmingly positive. The Queen now fitted into the Swinging 60s. As one journalist put it,"She's a warm, friendly person with a thoroughly engaging sense of humor." But the formal royal portrait remained hugely important. It continued to function as both constitutional statement and essential artifact for bodies desiring to express their linkage with the Crown. Around the time of the TV show, Roy Strong, director of the National Portrait Gallery, commissioned a portrait of Elizabeth for the nation. Thinking first of a family group, but fearful of commissioning something artistically retrograde, Strong sought the advice from Lawrence Gowing of the Tate Gallery. He was the wrong person to ask. Unless he got, open inverted commas,"a really remarkable picture," Gowing advised, he told strong not to bother, saying the Royal family was no longer interesting as a subject, that the very few good painters who could make such a picture would refuse, and that the only great one who might accept would surely be unacceptable to the Royals. We're never told, incidentally, who this artist was, but I can return to that a little bit later. Undeterred, excuse me for a moment. Undeterred, Roy Strong secured a business lunch with the Queen. It's all in his diaries. She rejected his suggestion of another family group, so strong pitched the idea of a single portrait, later revealing the Queen's forthright responses to earlier commissions, again, in his published diaries. One new portrait, the Queen told him, was simply too awful. Another made her look like a midget. Strong recalls Annigoni was the only artist whose name passed her lips. Do I tackle the possibility of her sitting to Annigoni again? Strong pondered and then decided he could. The Italian said yes. The result is fascinating. Annigoni was happy to return to his illustrious subject. For an artist who favored the depiction of youthful belladonnas, however, a Queen in her early 40s with two largely grown up children and a decade and a half's reign under her belt, required a different solution. Annigoni took his time. He managed to negotiate a staggering 18 sittings. 10 of them, extraordinarily, went into producing a loose head sketch, revealing, I suspect, the degree to which this new commission was a challenge to him. Although critical opinion was more divided this time round, largely because of its starkness, the resultant portrayal engendered enormous press and public interest. Once more, Annigoini deployed his famous mantle. Why not? But this time, even more boldly in crimson using her guise as head of the Order of the British Empire. To accentuate the clarity of her outline, he treated the background with modernist simplicity. By placing her in a square rather than a rectangle and full-frontally as opposed to contra-posto, the result is statuesque and hierarchical. So, what was Annigoni drawing upon? The fall of an open cape silhouetted against a low skyline was not new. Look at this image by the virtuoso of Regency portraiture, Sir Thomas Lawrence. It shows us the great actor John Phillip Kemble as Hamlet in 1801 in the robes of the Prince of Denmark. Lawrence also deployed it in several of his marshal portraits of the Duke of Wellington. This is an unfinished portrait in the National Portrait Gallery showing Lawrence's preparation for his all-defining commander's cape. The completed picture was widely distributed in prints and studio copies. But Annigoni was also tapping again into the Italian Renaissance, and I'm convinced of this. After all, he was an active religious and biblical painter, seen here, and executed paintings and murals for churches in both Italy and England. It may have felt natural for him to use Catholic imagery for a Queen who embodied real and metaphorical notions of motherhood. The Queen's own family had become an increasingly conspicuous part of her public life. She begun to project herself as"A good mother of my country," a term used by Elizabeth I to describe her maternalistic preeminence within a male-structured hierarchy. Viewed through the prism of the Catholic cannon, it seems to me that unconsciously, or otherwise, he's setting the Queen up as an iconographic version of Mary Mother of the Church. The famous Madonna della Miscordia or Madonna of Mercy by the 15th century Tuscan artist Piero Della Francesca is the first picture that comes to mind. Piero's Mary protects her people with a shielding cloak. She stands with a totemic presence, in much the same way as Annigoni's Elizabeth. The effect is partly achieved by silhouetting her against a starkly empty background, in this case, gold. I can't help feeling Annigoni had challenges however, when it came to appropriate facial expression. The features are slightly faltering. You can't really see it in this room, but probably online, the mouth not as assimilated as Princess Margaret would've liked. Nevertheless, the entire conception embodies a powerful numinous presence, a progressive icon of female sovereignty at a time when talent was both thin on the ground or slow to step forward. And what did the Queen think of it? At the unveiling, her verdict was diplomatically inscrutable. She said, "It looks very different with a frame."(audience laughs) The expectations for formal imagery, although tempered by fashion, remain relatively constant over the next five decades. Across the Atlantic, however, things were different, and dare I say it, slightly eccentric. The Americans and Canadians, certainly at this date, had less rules for royal iconography. Why should they? This meant that a photographic portrayal of Her Majesty made in the 1950s by a Canadian portraitist could turn out like this.(audience laugh)(page rustles) In 1959, the Queen went on an extensive tour of all the Canadian provinces. This surprisingly prosaic portrait was made by the Canadian Donald McKague. After some research, I've concluded that the iconographic language seems partly to derive from contemporary magazine advertisements for fridges and dresses.(audience laugh) That's art history for you. Now, when it came to the medium of oil on canvas, the Queen fared a little better. In 1971, the Virginian artist Joseph Wallace King, gained a sitting with the Queen for a painting to celebrate the state of North Carolina's historic link to the Crown as its first colony in the new world. its first colony in the new world. And this is what he did with it. but to me, it evokes illustrations from contemporary film posters and would sit happily upon the cover of a Mills and Boon novel.(audience laugh) But it useful shows to us the very real difference between royal mysticism, the depiction of which this lecture is hoping to define, and a more fictional type of romanticism. Back to Britain now, and we find ourselves thrown into the middle ages of Elizabethan portraiture. This distinctive period lasts from the early 70s to the early 90s. It was a time marked by a tendency, and I can't deny it, to depict this profoundly unusual person as profoundly normal. As well as greater informality in fashion, by the mid-1970s, many more women had joined the national workforce and portrait makers tended to play down the Queen's monarchical stature, rendering her sovereignty more accessible, and therefore, less mysterious. Michael Noakes, part of this new breed of artist, developed a relationship of friendship and trust with the Royal Family. In 1972, he was asked by the City of London Corporation to paint seven members of the Royal Family in six different locations. Commissioned to celebrate the Silver Wedding anniversary of the Queen and Prince Philip, the group portrait now hangs in London's Guildhall Gallery. This related composition was painted in '73, 74 and depicts the Queen in the same radiantly blue, but business-like fur-trimmed coat, hat and gloves. The singularity of her status is imparted by her confidently face-on central placement with an abstracted formal interior behind, quite a formal but abstract notion. Facially, it also hints at the relaxed relationship between the artist and the sitter that lasted over many years. Young Prince Charles liked the depiction so much that he acquired a version of it for his private collection. To commemorate her 60th birthday in 1985, the "Reader's Digest" commissioned artist Michael Leonard to paint a new work for the National Portrait Gallery. Technically and artistically, it's reliant on a photograph taken by Yousuf Karsh, a year or so earlier. But it's notable for its relaxed demeanor in both expression and dress. An attitude, in fact, more commonly encountered in photography than oil painting. It also highlights, as with Noakes, the method by which the Queen was able to use strident dress color as a substitute for more literal magisterial references. Majesty is further but subtly reinforced by the gilding on the sofa and background paneling. Repurposing the futile tradition of portraying a master with their faithful dog, Spark, a favorite royal Corgi snucks into the composition. This "me and my dog" normalization perfectly hit mid-90s sensibilities. It was a runaway success. From the late 90s, the challenge of showing this middle-aged normal Queen continued to stimulate different artistic responses. In 1997, Justin Mortimer, who'd made his name five years earlier by winning the National Portrait Galleries coveted BP Portrait Award, was commissioned by the RSA Royal Society of Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce, to paint an innovative portrait of the Queen. Seeing as this was a period of considerable artistic innovation, the natural question arises, why hadn't anyone attempted a radical portrait before? The obvious answer is that the conservative requirements of the commissioning institutions combined with the demands and nuances of sovereign portrayal made it extremely difficult. But Mortimer made a courageous attempt.(mouse clicks)(audience laugh) This from 1997 is certainly striking. Mortimer painted the Queen's head floating above her body to illustrate her detachment and isolation from modern life."I felt she was from another era," he told the "Wall Street Journal,""I don't have anything in common with her, apart from being English."(audience laugh) Uncomfortably, evocative of Charles I gory's end(audience laugh) on the executioners block, the detached head is a bold, but, to my mind, heavy-handed attempt to blend ceremonial portraiture with artistic radicalism despite the twain's inherent incompatibility. But I can't help admiring Mortimer's radiant response to where the sitting took place, the infamous Yellow Drawing Room.(audience laugh) Another answer to the over normalized Queen came from a well-known figurative painter. It proved how with a touch of technical genius, figurative portrayal can be every bit as controversial, probably more so than abstraction. Here we have a flashback to the 1960s. We don't know precisely who Lawrence Gowing was thinking of when he told Roy Strong that the only great painter who might be prepared to paint the Royal Family would be unlikely to find their favor. But I can't help feeling that the most obvious candidate, not least because Gowing later wrote a book about him and sat for a portrait to him, was the brilliant, but dangerous Lucian Freud. the grandson of the founder of psychotherapy, had begun to turn heads and arrest people as a teenager in the early 40s, and went on to establish himself as one of the most important figurative painters of the century. In 1999, Freud agreed to paint the Queen after a conversation with Sir Robert Fellowes, who had recently retired as her Private Secretary and was also being painted by Freud. An attempt to organize such a portrait had apparently failed six years earlier because Freud insisted on 72 sittings and demanded that the Queen come to his studio in Kensington Church Street. She wasn't up for that.(audience laugh) But he subsequently relaxed his demands, and Fellowes got Freud to accept just 10 sittings. In return, the Queen had to settle for an almost miniature-sized portrait, originally just 20 centimeters high, and agreed to leave the Yellow Drawing Room, or similar, for the anodyne, but for Freud more conducive, environment of the conservation studio at St. James' Palace. That's where we're seeing her, the Queen sitting Freud's notorious absence of sentimentality and searing pursuit of subjective realism always meant that this commission was not going to be straightforward. He did not disappoint."The Guardian" thought the result was probably the best royal portrait for 150 years.(audience laugh) The "Sun" said Freud should be locked in the tower.(audience laugh) I don't consider myself as having particularly conservative tastes, nor am I myopically adherent royalist. But try as I might, I just can't get comfortable with Freud's strenuous avoidance of idealism in this characterization. On the subject of creating art, Freud once concluded"Everything is a self-portrait." But when it comes to portraits of the sovereign or the magisterial, could he not have been just a little bit kinder? He certainly was with his painting of his pet whippets(audience laugh) Differential sentiments bubbled from their core with artists like Beaton and Annigoni, but not with Freud. Brilliant as this is in demonstrating his dexterity with the materiality of paint on a small scale, I see it first as a portrait by Freud and only second as a portrait of the Queen. But even Freud couldn't entirely escape all the dictates of royal iconography. As we all know, a physical encounter with art can sometimes impart things that a reproduction can't. I went to visit this portrait on display at the National Gallery last year, probably some of you in this room did also. The first thing I noticed was that compared to the other Freuds in the same room, the tonality of the Queen's visage was subtly brighter. I also clocked, for the first time, how the pose accentuated by its cropped format, was emphatically full frontal as befits an iconic, hierarchical image, It's a playing card image. And peering into the surface, risking a rebuke from the security guards, which often happens to me, it was just possible to see how Freud had decided to increase the height of the canvas by 3.5 centimeters to make room for a diadem, that's what she's wearing, or a half crown, which she painted on afterwards. Given, as the royal historian Hugo Vickers astutely pointed out,"She's wearing a day dress not designed to be worn with diadems." Could it be viewed as a self-correcting last minute add-on? Was Freud, the famous non-compromiser, despite his misgivings, feeling a need to clock the mood of changed times? In the late 1990s, around her 70th birthday, we see a new confidence emerging in the way artists portrayed the Queen's sovereign persona. No matter the calamities, misfortunes, and marital collapses that the Crown had had to face at the time, words like "constancy" and"dedication" began to appear in descriptions of her. Despite some rare errors, such as the retarded response to Diana's death, which recalled the Queen's similarly belated response to the Aberfan disaster back in 1966, a new consensus had emerged. The Queen's lifetime service and commitment had become almost universally acknowledged and admired. A new type of regal motherhood, or perhaps more accurately"grandmotherhood," had now come about. Richard Stone was one of the first to portray the beginnings of this venerable phase. The atmospheric thought of light upon her robes was the result of an intricate lighting setup. Stone sought to portray, in his words,"Her extraordinary inner strength and steadfastness." Painted in the summers of '89 to '91. this is one of several studies for a much larger work that was commissioned by Colchester in honor of the anniversary of their Royal Charter. Another example of the venerable Queen was painted by Andrew Festing in 1999. In this work for the Royal Hospital Chelsea, Festing sets the monarch center stage in a full, regal, full length. Partly, I imagine, to overcome the, by now common, lack of granted sittings for portraitists, he's effectively made it part subject painting, to use the term. In the background are two living pensioners in their historical uniforms, together with Van Dyke's portrait of Charles I family, adeptly alluding to the institution's 17th century royal origins. And the new millennium opened with this no less venerable full-length of the Queen on the grand staircase of Buckingham Palace. Commissioned by the Drapers Hall, this is by the Russian-born Sergei Pavlenko. The painterly alla prima technique of flowing, blended strokes, evokes the dazzling years of high society portraiture prior to the First World War then dominated by the great John Singer Sargeant. In 2002, Nigerian-born Chinwe Chukwogo-Roy was chosen from a short list of five artists by the Commonwealth Secretariat to paint an official portrait for the Queen's Golden Jubilee. The result was a bold fusion of exuberance and sunlit fantasy. The backdrop is a capriccio combining the Taj Mahal, the Houses of Parliament, and the Sydney Opera House. The work exudes warmth between the artists as subject, as well as a bold depiction of the numinous aspects of sovereignty."I laughed so much that day," Chukwogo-Roy recalled."At the same time the Queen was very gracious. I hope that the painting reflects these qualities." There's now a study for that in the royal collection. This venerable phase continued in the years after the Queen's Golden Jubilee. Public enthusiasm for the celebrations exceeded expectations. The Queen was now more popular than at any time since her ascension half a century earlier. One portrait stands at the very apotheosis of these later representations. When in 2004, the Jersey Heritage Trust commissioned Chris Levine to take a hologram portrait of the Queen, no one could have predicted that an outtake would become one of the most successful images of the creed ever made. The Yellow Drawing Room was set up as a dark photographic studio and a camera system specially built in the shape of a half moon. The hologram required hundreds of individual shots over a period of eight seconds, during which time the Queen was required to keep entirely still and her eyes open. After that time, she could close them and rest. There was a change of outfit during the shooting. Crucially, instead of her traditional cape, she wore an ermine stole. In the view of the artist, this helped make the photograph resonantly modern and iconic. It was a long while after the creation of the hologram that Levine noticed amongst the multiple single images this moment of rest. It was a further eight years before the sitting, after the sitting, I should say, that the palace approved the release of this remarkable image. One of the delights of art is how the unforeseen or accidental can spark ideas and meaning. And this applies to royal portraiture. It took Levine's laser-lit, sovereign brightness, reminiscent of Beaton's powerfully backlit coronation portrait for the serendipity to work, however. By dint of her closed eyes, the Queen appears affectingly unguarded. While its brightness is humanly transforming, there is sufficient honesty in the lined, powdered skin, and enhanced lipstick to provide realism. The message heightened by a conspicuous dark aura is of meditative serenity and transcendence. The resting Queen is utterly novel for having combined the magisterial with modern idioms. I can find no precedent for it in art history with a possible exception of death masks, or deathbed portraits, and their sense of acquiescent finality. At this point, it could be argued that among all the portraits we've seen so far, we still haven't seen one of the Queen that combines her role of sovereign with a conspicuous psychological dimension. Levine's lightness of being was too much of a happy accident to be described as one. And Freud's, despite his concessions, was too much of a self-portrait to get there. As a Queen, she'd been able, in life as in art, to wear a mask that rarely, if ever slipped. By 2007, however, perhaps it now felt time for someone to artfully grapple with a combination of majesty and its shadow. An artist photographer stepped forward from across the Atlantic with sufficient objectivity and creative skill to do this. Annie Leibovitz is one of the most celebrated portrait photographers of our time. By 2007, she'd already taken scores of defining photographs of world celebrities, including an enduring last photo of John Lennon with Yoko Ono a few hours before he was murdered. To celebrate the Queen's visit to the United States, which coincided with the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, Leibovitz was commissioned to take a series of photographs of which this to my mind is the most significant. Leibovitz came up with an interesting comment in relation to her commission."I felt honored," she said."I also felt that because I was an American, I had an advantage over every other photographer or painter who'd made a portrait offer. It was okay for me to be reverent." As I've sought to demonstrate when attempting sovereign portraiture, coming from an unacquainted culture in relation to monarchy can be challenging, sometimes disastrous. Instead, Leibovitz saw it as an advantage and approached the Queen as she had many of the great figures that she portrayed with a combination of respect, creativity, and psychological astuteness. In later recalling the sitting, which only lasted 25 minutes, Leibovitz told the Queen that she was using Beaton as a reference, to which the Queen replied,"You have to find your own way." Unlike Beaton, Leibovitz treated her picture in two stages, first the portrait and then the background against which the image was knitted. Annigoni and Beaton's magic cloak is redeployed against a brooding sky and thorny landscape. This is the only formal portrait I know that successfully combines majesty with the darker trials of her position. Leibovitz, a great American photographer, has to my mind expanded royal iconography without damaging it. She's advanced the royal presence into a subtle allegory of human endurance. Our mother of the nation has come out the other side.(page rustles) Partly in the interest of the time available, and thank you for being so patient, I've here decided a need to end this survey. There are many other significant portraits and photographs of the Queen we could include after this date, including a follow up to the Leibovitz by the great photographer Julian Calder. But the Leibovitz does take us to a natural highwater mark for the time. There is no doubt too that as she reached her late 70s, and sorry, late 80s and 90s, the Queen's evident antiquity and the reduction in available sittings made the portrayal of majesty more complex. To conclude, what I've attempted to show you is what I think boils down to something quite simple. We live in a country, and the remains of a commonwealth, that still largely accept the principle of a non-elected figurehead. figurehead. Although the Queen largely left the artist and photographer an expectation, if you like, from both her as a subject and the commissioning body to recognize this, together with an exception acceptance that majesty needs to reflect its times. We began with Beaton's Faerie Queene. This was then tempered by Annigoni with marshal, gender-leveling characterization.ç Well, over a decade later, this grew into something totemic and matriarchal with his second commission, A period of middle-aged majesty followed with two notable attempts at something more radical, abstract and figurative. And then as her life progressed, we witness a transfiguration into venerability. This culminates with a portraitist who was able to imbue majesty with an updated sense of emotional realism. And what do all these have in common? A need to grapple with Queen's evolving human presence together with something insurmountably deep in our primal origins, something not easily messed around with, the force of symbolism and its indivisibility from our makeup. The Queen herself undoubtedly understood this. I leave you with her retort to Annie Leibovitz, who at one point had the temerity to suggest to the Queen that she'd take off her diadem, crown, because in her words, "it was too dressy."(audience laugh)"Less dressy?!" snapped back the Queen."What do you think this is?"(audience laughing) Thank you very much indeed.(audience applauding)- Thank you very much. we've got time for some questions. We've got some that have come in online. So I'll ask the first one of those, and then maybe we can come to the room and ask if any of you have questions. So, she looks so sort of tranquil and and contented, doesn't she? But do you think she enjoyed being painted?- Well, I think that the evidence is that she saw it as a job, a task. And I think it was probably an opportunity for her to meet people in a sort of slightly informal, relaxed way, that was not normally like the rest of the day job. I think she just got on with it. I think, you know, that's what I think is a characteristic of the Queen. I don't know whether anyone else has another view on that, but I think she was conscientious, and she seemed, yeah, she seemed to enjoy it, I think, probably.- It looks like she enjoyed talking to the artist, for instance, doesn't it? It seems.- Yeah.- [Man In Audience] Thank you very much indeed for a fabulous talk. A bit of a "Desert Island Discs" question, if the waves were encroaching, and you had to grab one, which would it be?- Mm-hmm. Yes, which would it be if I had to grab one? Well, oh gosh, art is so much about where would you hang it? And I think a lot of these paintings are about where they're designed for. But what I can say is I very nearly bid for an Annie Leibovitz of this image about two months ago. But in the end, I thought, "No." And it was very, very expensive. And I've never contemplated spending that much on a photograph, but I do find it rather enrapturing. So probably I would take that, and, of course, I'd take "the first Annigoni" as well, wouldn't I? I'd roll that up.(audience laugh)- [Man In Audience] The last one there, there's another photograph by Leibovitz, isn't it, where she's wearing, the"Knight of the Thistle?"- No, so that's the Julian Calder.- Totally in a different- Oh, that's Julian Calder.- Which is an outstanding later one but done natural on the moors. And they had to get all the regalia out there, didn't they? And following on from the Leibovitz in sort of expanding the idiom. But yeah, good point. And that's the Calder. But we, you know, 50 minutes, we had to stop there.- [Man In Audience] Thanks.- [Man In Audience 2] Very good talk Philip. Do you think the Queen, that is, Queen Elizabeth II, had an enormous advantage because she was a very young Queen, and those rarely powerful images in her first decade were always there in our brains. Even when we see the Freud picture later, you keep seeing the Annigoni, and you look back, and perhaps because of that great beauty that she had in those early days, it was so powerful that it overrode anything that ever came later. And I think that is so unique'cause the same can't happen for Charles III. It's very difficult.- I know, and it, in fact, can be very interesting to see how the iconography of Charles III develops. But you are right. I mean, she was radiant. Everyone saw it. It was the new Elizabethan age. And you're right, she was greatly served by her charismatic appearance and face. But in a funny sort of way, you know, although middle period or the Middle Ages, as I call it, well, that exciting, the late portraits, the very late ones. I think you do get a little bit of that venerable majesty back in a different way, a different type of beauty. But very good point.- Thank you. We've had people asking too, how does it work? Does she ask people to paint her, or does she get a flood of inquiries all the time and have to decide where she can put her sitting time?- Very rarely would she ask people to paint her. There's a James Gunn in the Royal Collection from the 50s, and the Lucian Freud is part of the Royal Collection. But almost all the images that we're talking about, apart from the commissioned photographs for anniversaries, and events, and what have you, are commissioned by institutions, livery companies, you know, regiments, embassies. Unilever even commissioned one,"Readers Digest" commissioned one. But they normally have to sort of use it in some public-serving way. But that's what generates the images. It's the need for, it's a sort of Feudal Legacy, if you want.- And then they hang them, do they, in the Feudal Hall?- Oh, indeed. I mean, absolutely. Yes, very prominently. Particularly, you know, guild halls.- Yes, yes. Wonderful, wonderful. Lovely. Well, thank you. I wanted to thank you very much, and thank everyone for coming. It's been a real pleasure this evening. Thank you.- Thank you very much, indeed.(audience applauding)