Christopher Smith
In the space of a few days last month, by coincidence, I saw the originals of those two famous paintings of Her Majesty the Queen by Pietro Annigoni. The earlier picture, from 1955, is perhaps the most familiar of all her portraits, and it made Annigoni the most famous portraitist of modern times. He was not in any way a modernist—which is perhaps why people like his work—and his self-portrait of 1946 tells you immediately that he placed himself in the Florentine Renaissance tradition. And that 1955 portrait of the Queen, although it was condemned by the Times as lacking vitality, brings out the remarkable strength of character of our young monarch. It is one of those portraits that very clearly gives you an insight into the personality of its subject.
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In it, Her Majesty is portrayed wearing the robes of the Order of the Garter, and the painting was a commission from the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers. It is still in the Fishmongers’ Hall on London Bridge, which was where I saw it in mid-May. The background is stark, as if she were standing in some unidentified moorland, but there is some detail at the bottom of the canvas which I had never thought about until I found myself standing in front of it. It put me in mind of Bruegel, although that may be the colours as much as the style.
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The later portrait, painted in 1969, portrays the Queen wearing the robes of the Order of the British Empire, and was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery. I encountered it last month because the Gallery had lent it to the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, who, as part of their annual exhibition, had included a Jubilee series of eight portraits of Her Majesty by members of the Society, which was founded in the 1890s when the Royal Academy was having one of its periodic bouts of self-destructive snootiness. The O.B.E. robes are red, and the background here is very bare, giving the Queen a rather isolated look, but it is still a powerful portrait. It was less popular than the earlier work, perhaps because it looks a bit severe, but Annigoni is quoted on the NPG website as saying, ‘I did not want to paint her as a film star; I saw her as a monarch, alone in the problems of her responsibility’.
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I would have commended that exhibition at the Mall Galleries to you, but it was only on for ten days. The other portraits of the Queen made an interesting study in contrasts, but they all gave us a sense of the dignity of the sitter. They included a very ‘proper’ portrait by June Mendoza which, to my mind, doesn’t bring the personality out from the canvas, and a recent one by Benjamin Sullivan for the Royal Air Force Club, which does—and there is a steely quality in her face there which serves to remind us that, even under a constitution which rightly delegates the politics to politicians, she is the glue which holds that constitution together.
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There was also a portrait by Antony Williams, painted for the Royal Society of Portrait Painters themselves, which I like but find frustratingly marred by the fact that he’s made her fingers look like sausages. I have to confess to being unenthusiastic about the photorealism of Miriam Escofet, but I did like the sketch by Robbie Wraith, who was a pupil of Annigoni, and who shows the Queen looking fondly into the middle distance.
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Andrew Festing was commissioned by the Royal Hospital Chelsea, and he paints her in the coronation robe with a gently amused expression flickering across her face. He includes a brace of Chelsea Pensioners and, on the wall behind, their copy of the painting by Van Dyck known as the ‘Greate Peece’, depicting Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria with their two eldest children, the future Charles II and Princess Mary.
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This, then, is my little contribution to our Jubilee celebrations, and what a contrast there is between the dignity of the Monarch and so much of what we see around us in public life today. As I write, the air is filled with too much information about MPs looking at smutty videos in the House of Commons and footballers’ wives suing each other for reasons I have neither the time nor the enthusiasm to fathom. In a society which elevates the demotic over the measured, the Queen is an example to us all. As she said in her Christmas Broadcast of 2008, ‘I hope that, like me, you will be comforted by the example of Jesus of Nazareth who … makes it clear that genuine human happiness and satisfaction lie more in giving than receiving; more in serving than in being served’. May God bless her.