ROYALS EXTRA BRIEF: CHARLES NOW AND THEN
His first portrait as King recalls a similarly sensitive likeness more than five decades ago.
On the eve the King’s trip to Germany, the first state visit of his reign, Charles III released his first portrait as monarch. At age 74, Charles has been painted numerous times, and is himself a keen watercolorist who has promoted the careers of many artists. (I’ll have more to say on that in the future). This time he entrusted his likeness to 36-year-old Alastair Barford, although he never formally sat for the artist. Instead, Barford took photographs and made sketches as he observed the King at a Buckingham Palace reception in February to promote biodiversity. The artist says he wanted “to capture his warmth and sensitivity.” He also offers a glimpse of a beaded bracelet given to the King by Domingo Peas, an Amazon indigenous leader, at the reception—a nod to Charles’s longtime role as a campaigner for sustainability. The Times of London judged the painting an “accurate likeness,” but added that the King “seems melancholy, on the brink of tears.”
I was reminded of one of the early oil portraits of the King painted in 1971 when he was 22 years old. The artist was 55-year-old Derek Hill, a close friend of Charles’s great-uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten, whose advice the young prince counted on. That summer Charles was learning to fly jet aircraft at a Royal Air Force Base in Lincolnshire. He posed patiently for Hill over an entire week, and he was so exhausted by his training that he nodded off during the sittings. Like the portrait unveiled today, Hill’s likeness was a three-quarter view, with a similarly pensive gaze. Hill’s biographer, Bruce Arnold, observed that in the portrait “there is no manifestation of power, since there is no power...The prince does indeed look fatigued, but also bewildered and uncertain.”