Tell me your Majesty, how did I didgeridoo?
Rolf Harris unveils his portrait of the Queen, showing ‘the lady as she is’
SOONER or later, the question had to be asked. The Queen had been sitting motionless for the best part of an afternoon as Rolf Harris (yes, that Rolf Harris) set about painting her portrait.
‘ Can you tell what it is yet?’ he asked her after the first series of brushstrokes. And apparently, she could.
History does not yet record whether Her Majesty recognised his famous catchphrase in the question, but according to the didgeridoo- playing entertainer, they both had a good laugh.
Yesterday, the result of this unique collaboration between two of Britain’s great institutions – the monarch and the man who gave the nation Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport – was unveiled at Buckingham Palace.
Next month, the BBC will show how the TV presenter’s name came to rank alongside the likes of Lucian Freud and Philip de Laszlo as portrait artists to the Queen. Mr Harris put it rather more modestly when he pulled back the drapes on his creation yesterday. The early stages of his oil on canvas, he admitted, ‘made her look like a pork butcher from Norwich’.
And he said that trying to capture her radiant expression initially produced a smile that looked as if she had a row of teeth perched on her bottom lip.
But Mr Harris believed he had crafted ‘ a good likeness’. He was particularly excited about ‘ the blueness of the veins coming through the skin’ on the Queen’s hands and forearms – a detail, you may think, for which the subject might have preferred a softer brush.
The Queen agreed to sit for Mr Harris after the BBC commissioned him to mark her 80th birthday next year.
The Queen, By Rolf will be screened on January 1. It shows the 75-year- old Australian arriving at Buckingham Palace, carrying a blank canvas like a wobble-board under one arm. A staunch monarchist, he is clearly enthusiastic about the prospect of painting ‘The Queen of England’, as he calls her. Perhaps because of the TV cameras, monarch seems at first to be more nervous than painter ( he was, after all, named in a 1992 poll as ‘the world’s most famous artist’).
But she quickly relaxes, declaring at one stage that the painting looked ‘very friendly’.
The work, one of more than 130 portraits for which the Queen has sat, was based on a sitting in the yellow drawing room of the palace, and on a photograph Mr Harris took of her there.
He asked her to look out of the window and then turn to greet him – adding (to the undoubted horror of genealogists and constitutional experts) ‘ as if I was a favourite grandson’.
He told her not to worry if she needed to walk around after sitting still for so long. But she told him: ‘I’m only too happy to be sitting motionless, doing nothing.’
Did she get the joke when he asked if she could tell what it was yet? ‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘I was laughing like a horse, and she was laughing too. But maybe she did it just to make me feel comfortable.’ The work, which is on display in the Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace from today until June 11, took two months and many sleepless nights to complete.
Mr Harris revealed: ‘I’d wake up at two in the morning . . . get dressed, switch on the lights and start painting, night after night, sometimes painting for three hours, working on the little details.
‘I wanted to avoid the formal sort of portrait with all the jewellery and pomp and splendour. It’s not a photograph, it’s an impressionist painting. I wanted to capture the lady as she is, with all her humour and reality.’
Although the Queen has not yet seen the completed portrait, the result did not please everyone. ‘Do you really think of yourself as a great artist?’ asked a questioner at the palace unveiling yesterday.
Mr Harris looked momentarily as if the Animal Hospital vet had just put down a sick puppy. He spoke quietly in reply. ‘ I’m not making any claims that this is the greatest painting in the world ever,’ he said. ‘But I’ve done the best I can, and I’ve enjoyed doing it.’