In the shadow of a romantic masterpiece
It is a deliberate echo of the early days of her reign. Showing Her Majesty in grand ceremonial robes and collar of the Order of the Thistle, set against ominous skies, this new portrait is based on Pietro Annigoni’s 1955 painting of the Queen aged 29. The artist, Nicky Philipps, said capturing the 92-year-old monarch on canvas was nerve-racking but enormous fun, after the oil painting was unveiled at Holyrood Palace, Her Majesty’s official residence in Scotland. But Mark Hudson, the Telegraph art critic, concludes that it is, unfortunately, an unresolved work.
In 1955, the Italian painter Pietro Annigoni created what was to become the iconic portrait of the young Elizabeth II: the 29-yearold monarch, looking serene but quietly determined in the robes of the Order of the Garter, seen against a pastoral landscape, but with just a hint of romantic storminess in the sky overhead.
Dismissed as “chocolate boxy” kitsch by art specialists – and snobs – the painting was wildly popular with the general public, attracting huge crowds when first exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.
The current painting is an attempt to update that image, with the Queen 63 years on, wearing the deep green robes of the Order of the Thistle, facing toward us, but looking up and beyond, with a flinty twinkle in her eye, beneath a sky that’s considerably more ominous than the one in the 1955 painting, perhaps hinting at the state of the world today, while conveying a touch of baroque grandeur.
I don’t want to appear unkind, but whatever the limitations of Annigoni’s painting, it is a masterpiece compared with this one.
Annigoni, who prided himself on “working in the Renaissance tradition”, may have been a bit of an old ham, but his clean-cut forms are at least fully resolved.
There’s a muffling, cloudy patchiness to Nicky Philipps’s paint application, despite the fact that the painting is believed to have been done from a photograph by Annie Leibovitz. Where Annigoni’s painting was
‘It is neither clinically frank in its view of the way the Queen has aged, nor an aggrandising idealisation’
derided for being romanticised, it does have something authentically romantic about it.
Ms Philipps’s doesn’t seem to have decided what it wants to be. It is neither clinically frank in its view of the way the Queen has aged, nor an aggrandising idealisation, but an uneasy fudge compromise.
When it comes to portraiture, knowing what you want to say about the subject and how you’re going to say it is more than half the battle. This painting doesn’t seem sure of either.