Royals’ favourite portrait painter dies at 84

Michael Noakes painted royals, presidents, prime ministers and even a pope. Works by the English artist, who has died aged 84, hang in the National Portrait Gallery, as well as the British Museum and the House of Commons.

His subjects included the Duke and Duchess of York, Bill Clinton, Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Hume, Sir Ralph Richardson, Sir Alec Guinness and Earl Mountbatten.

However, it was for his association with the royal family that he will be best remembered.

He painted the Queen on several occasions, as well as the Prince of Wales, the Queen Mother, Duke of Edinburgh and Princess Royal.

He was given unprecedented access to the monarch’s routine for his book, The Daily Life of the Queen: An Artist’s Diary, published in 2000.

The pictorial record was a collaboration with his wife, the writer Vivien Noakes, and was created after he spent a year following the royal party around Britain and tours of Asia and Africa.

No outsider had ever been allowed such close access to the Queen for so long and Noakes took in everything from the pomp of state visits to behind the scenes preparations in the palace kitchens. The VIP treatment did not extend to the Braemar Games, when the artist was thrown out on suspicion of being a terrorist.

Born in Brighton in 1933, the son of an estate manager, Noakes was keen on art from a young age and after national service he studied design at the Reigate School of Art. He graduated from Royal Academy Schools in London in 1960.

In a canny move during his studies, he approached the television presenter Gilbert Harding and asked if he could paint his portrait. Harding was so impressed that it opened the door to a series of high profile sitters and a job in television, as art correspondent for the BBC programme Town and Around.

Noakes worked on the show for four years and appeared regularly as an art expert in Britain, the USA and South Africa. A friendship with Eric Morley, creator of the Miss World pageant, won him one of his more unusual roles, a place on the judging panel in 1976. His first royal portrait was a commission from the Corporation of London to paint the Queen and family members to celebrate her Silver Wedding in 1972.

Five years later, Manchester Town Hall ordered a full-length portrait of the monarch wearing the robes of the Order of the Bath for her Silver Jubilee and the town hall’s centenary.

He painted the Queen a third time in 1979, in her role as Colonel-in-Chief of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment and said she chatted nonstop during sittings.

He went to Nepal to sketch the Himalayas for a portrait of Prince Charles as Colonel-in-Chief of the Second King Edward’s Own Gurkhas and to the Duchy of Cornwall for the picture on the £5 coin minted to mark his 50th birthday.

Noakes was a past president of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, a member of the council of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, and a director of the Federation of British Artists.

He recently completed a portrait of Dame Judi Dench. He is survived by his daughter and two sons.

Michael Noakes.