Kate’s official portrait gets slammed by critics
LONDON The Duchess of Cambridge seems to like her first official portrait, which is lucky for the artist. Many critics don’t.
Paul Emsley’s portrait of the former Kate Middleton shows the royal against a dark background, her lips pursed into a wry smile, with an ethereal light against her face and hair. Her pale complexion brings out the fine lines under the eyes, and the light adds a hint of silver to her rich brown hair.
Shortly after the portrait was unveiled Friday at the National Portrait Gallery in London, critics began grousing.
“It’s a great, great opportunity missed,” British Art Journal editor Robin Simon said. “The best thing you can say about it is that she doesn’t actually look like that.”
In a telephone interview, Simon said that Kate’s nose was too large and that the painting drained the duchess of her sparkle.
Kate “transmits a sense of joie de vivre,” he said. “This is dead, dead, dead.”
Guardian arts writer Charlotte Higgins picked up on that theme, saying the portrait had a “sepulchral gloom” about it.
“Kate Middleton is … a pretty young woman with an infectious smile, a cascade of chestnut hair and a healthy bloom,” she wrote on her paper’s website. “So how is it that she has been transformed into something unpleasant from the Twilight franchise?”
Emsley told reporters at the opening that it was always going to be tough painting Kate, who sat for the portrait last year. “A person whose image is so pervasive, for an artist it is really difficult to go beyond that and find something which is original,” he said. “You have to rely on your technique and your artistic instincts to do that, and I hope I’ve succeeded.”
In any case, Emsley appeared to have won over Kate, who was with her husband, Prince William, at the gallery Friday, and called the portrait “just amazing.” The Associated Press