The Artistic Passions of King Charles III
For more than fifty years, he has used every spare moment to paint watercolors, one of which is shown here for the first time
When artists from the Royal Drawing School turned up at Ascot this week, it wasn’t for the love of thoroughbred racing. King Charles III had assigned them to draw and paint the colorful scene at Royal Ascot, a four-day event dating to the reign of Queen Anne in 1771. Both Charles and Camilla were eager “to see how the artists capture the essence of this unique race meeting,” they wrote in the official Royal Ascot program.
From time to time, Charles has offered similar challenges to artists whose style pleased him. His friend John Ward sat unobtrusively in the choir at St. Paul’s Cathedral in July 1981 to paint Charles’s wedding to Lady Diana Spencer. In August the following year, Ward was in the Buckingham Palace Music Room to produce watercolors of Prince William’s christening.
At the heart of these profoundly traditional assignments is the King’s many years as a passionate amateur watercolor painter, which led to his equally passionate acquisitions of artwork for the Royal Collection. Many of the paintings he has acquired were by artists who accompanied him on his overseas tours as Prince of Wales. Their mission was to portray the places he visited in a more textured way than photographs can convey. In 1998 he published Travels With The Prince, a compendium of paintings and drawings by ten of these tour artists, along with fifty of his own landscapes.
“King Charles lived for me in that room”
His initial inspiration came from his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, “who taught me to look at things,” and was a committed art collector who counted artists among her circle of friends. As a child, Charles roamed the corridors of Windsor Castle, finding “all sorts of fascinating places” to apply his imagination. He especially thrilled to Sir Anthony van Dyck’s portrait, Charles I in Three Positions. “King Charles lived for me in that room in the castle,” he wrote, focusing on the greatness of the painting and overlooking the small matter of his namesake’s gruesome beheading.
As early as the age of eight, Charles’s first school term report noted that “he simply loves drawing and painting.” But it wasn’t until the summer of 1971 after graduating from Cambridge that he picked up a brush and started to paint in earnest. He had been frustrated by the limitations of a camera to record what he was seeing, “arriving at a result which is probably almost identical to somebody else’s photograph.” His grandmother wrote that “his powers of observation” had developed to a point that “painting became a necessary and vital expression” of his intense interest in the natural world that, as he explained, struck a deep “primordial chord.”
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