The Art of the Tour: King Charles's Traveling Painters
What's behind the new Buckingham Palace exhibition of artists who captured scenes from seventy royal tours over forty years
There is something almost audacious about the King’s decision to sponsor an exhibition in the crimson and gilded ballroom at Buckingham Palace featuring forty-three artists he recruited to paint during seventy royal tours around the world over the past forty years. Comparisons are inevitable with the Picture Gallery several rooms away, which features timeless works by Canaletto, van Dyke, Vermeer, Rembrandt, and other Old Masters. Few names of the men and women shown in “The King’s Tour Artists” will be recognizable to the hundreds of thousands of people visiting the Palace for its annual summer opening, which ends on September 28.
“A distillation of the far-reaching humanity”
But the absence of familiarity misses the point, which also makes the exhibition admirable. In the words of Nicky Dunne, the manager of the Heywood Hill bookshop in London, the exhibition is “a distillation of the far-reaching humanity of the monarch.”
Since his late teens, Charles has been a dedicated watercolor artist, an avocation I described in a Royals Extra titled The Artistic Passions of King Charles III in June 2024. He has been an equally keen patron of painters whose representational style he has long celebrated as well as practiced—very much against the grain of contemporary art. As a self-taught amateur painter, Charles specializes in delicate and sensitive landscapes. The artists he has supported are highly skilled professionals, some of whom he picked out in their student days, who work both in watercolors and oils.
Embellished with whimsical scenes
Accompanying the exhibition is a handsome large format book, The Art of Royal Travel: Journeys with The King, bound in maroon buckram with gilded letters. The endpapers painted by Toby Ward, one of Charles’s favorite artists, show a watercolor map of the world embellished with whimsical scenes from royal destinations—among them Brazil’s rain forest and Australia’s Ayer’s Rock. The book is illustrated with more than one hundred of the tour artists’ works. Only two watercolors by King Charles, both of a fluttering Union Flag seen from the deck of the royal yacht Britannia, are included. One takes regal precedence, occupying the title page.
The idea for the current exhibition and book came from Peter St. Clair-Erskine, the 7th Earl of Rosslyn, who serves as the Lord Steward and personal secretary to the King and Queen. As a career member of the Metropolitan Police, he was the head of security for the royal family from 2003 to 2014 and logged many tours with the late Queen Elizabeth II. He spent months inspecting every room in Charles’s private residences—Highgrove, Birkhall, Clarence House, and Sandringham—to itemize his collection of more than three hundred works by the tour artists. The King selected those that would appear in the book as well as the seventy-four paintings for the Palace exhibition.
Predictably enough, some critics sniffed at the King’s exhibition. “Extremely polite, well-executed works, quite a number of which feel like they could have been produced any time in the past two centuries,” concluded The Times. The Telegraph dismissed the lot as “clichéd and old fashioned…artistic duds” and one watercolor of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate as “criminally boring.” I’m no art critic, but the dissenters are not only missing many images of conspicuous beauty and creativity, but also the larger point that Charles has wanted artists to capture their impressions of the places he visited. As one of his advisers told me more than a decade ago, “People may roll their eyes in an age of digital photography, but it will be a wonderful record of his tours in the years to come. That is part of his complexity. It’s a terrible buzz word, but he does have a holistic vision. He has a spiritual side that is a very uncontemporary interest.”
“A record of contemporary life”
As Charles himself said in 1998, “The artists I commission are making a record of contemporary life, travelling with me. It’s not a representative museum collection, it’s something that reflects the age and individual taste.” His determined effort to create this assemblage and share it with the public has a valedictory feel as well. Given his age—turning seventy-seven in November— and his continuing treatment for cancer, it is hard to predict how many more overseas tours will be chronicled by his artists. And when King William V takes the throne, he is unlikely to continue this tradition. He lacks the zest for the visual arts so avidly embraced by his father.
By April 1985 when John Ward—a watercolorist who had painted scenes in Scotland for the Queen—accompanied the Prince of Wales to Italy as the first tour artist, Charles at age thirty-six had already been refining his approach to collecting and patronage. His early mentors were a fascinating and little-known duo with great influence, who I will discuss below. I will also share insights from the interviews I had with two tour artists twelve years ago. One has been close to Charles for more than forty years and helped him carry out his educational vision for aspiring artists. Her exquisitely evocative painting from Charles’s visit to Washington, D.C. in March 2015 shows how a painting can convey far more than a photograph of the same scene.
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