Michael Noakes
Portrait painter whose subjects included the Queen as well as archbishops, politicians and dons
MICHAEL NOAKES, who has died aged 84, was one of the Royal family’s favourite portrait painters and produced a unique pictorial record of the Queen’s daily life after he and his wife, the writer Vivien Noakes, spent a year following the royal party around Britain and parts of Asia and Africa.
It was the first time any outsider had been allowed so close to the Queen for so long and it transformed Noakes from a faint-hearted to a wholehearted monarchist. He was impressed by the scale of the Queen’s engagements, as well as the raptures which greeted her on state visits to nations where the head of state was head of government and armed forces. The diary’s text was less complimentary about the royal flunkeys who had persistently obstructed the Noakes’ progress. Noakes was amused to find himself ejected from the Braemar Games in Scotland by security guards convinced that the artist, then aged 66, was a terrorist.
The Daily Life of the Queen: An Artist’s Diary (2000), with illustrations by Noakes and text by his wife, was full of joyous impressionistic images, often of a boldly coloured sovereign against a shaded background, contrasting official functions and intimate glimpses of the minutiae of royal life, ranging from small paintings of police outriders outside Buckingham Palace to sketches of palace chefs preparing canapés and paint-and-pencil drawings of women line-dancing in Hull.
The pictures were radically different to the restrained portraits Noakes usually produced of world leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Bill Clinton. But his unerring knack of capturing a likeness of his subjects attracted a solid clientele from all walks of life as much as “the history-makers”. These included Benedictine abbots, Archbishops of Canterbury, Oxbridge dons, Cabinet ministers and judges.
Noakes was also a good landscape painter and his strength as an artist lay in his recognisable renderings of scenes and people. Although they lacked exciting brush strokes or original colour schemes, his quirky trompe l’oeil works hinted at less conventional depths. A self-portrait of Noakes in this medium, which covered the door next to his studio and depicted him aged 36, sucking on a black pipe and clutching a palette, once so confused an elderly client that he attempted to shake its hand.
Michael Noakes was born on October 28 1933 to Basil Noakes, an estate manager, and his wife Mary. As a child he wanted to become a comedian or a priest, but had developed a strong desire to paint by the time he reached Downside. After National Service in the Army – having a poor sense of direction he once set off leading a convoy of tanks and vehicles only to meet them later coming towards him – he studied design at the Reigate School of Art. He graduated from Royal Academy Schools in London in 1960.
As a young man, he joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and was denounced from the pulpit of his local Catholic church in Surrey for distributing tracts outside. He maintained that the offending leaflets consisted principally of papal pronouncements on just war.
For four years, he supplemented his income as the art correspondent of the BBC television programme Town and Around. From then on, he appeared regularly on television as an art expert, in Britain, in the US, and later in South Africa. His most unusual assignment was as a judge for Miss World 1976, a job gained through his friendship with Eric Morley, the inventor of the Miss World pageant.
The following year, Noakes and Morley featured in Portrait, a television programme in which Noakes painted the impresario. It ended with the picture’s unveiling – Morley’s horrified outburst was blocked from the television cameras by his wife Julia shrieking “Michael, how lovely”, and promptly kissing the artist.
A decade later, Noakes starred in Changing Places, a television programme in which professionals in related areas swapped jobs for a day. He took on the brief of Jak, the Evening Standard cartoonist, producing five cartoon ideas before breakfast, while Jak (Raymond Jackson) made a late return to lifedrawing classes and embarked on a portrait of Michael Heseltine. Noakes was judged to have adapted more successfully to his task.
In the meantime, he had built up a reputation as a royal portraitist, starting with a commission from the Corporation of London to paint the Queen and various members of her family to celebrate her Silver Wedding in 1972. Noakes had asked a courtier to tell the Queen that he would need to measure her head. When the courtier forgot, Noakes was forced to explain himself. Overawed and nervous, he gesticulated wildly at the Queen with a black marker pen, nearly drawing on her blue dress.
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. It graced an entrance staircase until the Eighties, when Left-wing councillors voted to shift it elsewhere, to make room for signs indicating the lavatories.
In 1979 Noakes painted the Queen a third time, as Colonel-in-chief of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment. By the time he embarked on the diary in 1999, he had spent more than 20 hours with the Queen, and reported that she chatted non-stop during sittings and had only two facial expressions – a radiant smile and a dour look that signified concentration. This, he explained, was why the Queen often looked grumpy in photographs.
A jovial, square-set man, Noakes liked to share with friends the social solecisms he had committed while painting various members of the Royal family. Once, while painting the Queen, he had snapped at Prince Charles for interrupting a sitting, assuming this unexpected intruder was a courtier: “I forgot it wasn’t my palace,” he later joked. The Queen Mother informed him during another sitting that some of her “treasured” hairpins were on the floor. Noakes ignored the hint and suddenly noticed she had vanished; he glanced down to see her on her hands and knees.
Noakes was a solid draughtsman who took pains to achieve the correct proportions for his art. While engaged on a 12ft 5in trompe l’oeil work of Lady Thatcher peering round the door of No 10 Downing Street, he measured the real doorsteps, railings and lamp post outside before creating the replicas which accompany the painting.
He flew to Nepal to sketch the Himalayas which rise up behind the Prince of Wales in a portrait of him as Colonel-in-chief of the Second King Edward’s Own Gurkhas, and trailed him around the Duchy of Cornwall for an image of the Prince for the £5 coin minted to mark his 50th birthday.
In a portrait of the Prince as patron the Royal College of Psychiatrists, however, Noakes was accused of depicting him as “glum”. Although Noakes’s royal portraits were usually uncontroversial, his portrayal of the Duke and Duchess of York, holding hands and casually attired, was described by one critic as having “all the poise of a knitting pattern”.
Noakes was also one of the rare painters to portray an American president: his two portraits of Bill Clinton were produced despite bad light in the Oval Office and hasty sittings.
His other subjects included Pope Benedict XVI, Dame Judi Dench, Cardinal Hume, the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Runcie, Dame Margaret Rutherford, Sir Ralph Richardson and Sir Alec Guinness, Field Marshal Lord Carver, Earl Mountbatten, JB Priestley, Lord Denning and Malcolm Muggeridge. He painted Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, the last surviving grandchild of Queen Victoria, when she was 96; she told him that her grandmother had been “very soft to kiss”. Noakes’s proudest possession was a silver platinum disc signed by Frank Sinatra, whom he had painted from photographs for the sleeve of his 1977 record Portrait of Sinatra. He hung the disc in his downstairs lavatory.
In 1968 Noakes wrote A Professional Approach to Oil Painting, in praise of his favourite artistic medium, and he was a regular contributor to arts journals. He was also a vigorous defender of artists’ rights in the press. He was a past president of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, the Society of Catholic Artists and the Reigate Society of Artists. He was also a member of the council of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, a director of the Federation of British Artists, a Chairman of the Contemporary Portrait Society, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
He married, in 1960, Vivien Langley, who became best known for her outstanding biography of Edward Lear. She died in 2011. Their daughter and two sons survive him.