The Daily Telegraph - Features
It’s the King’s Gallery now – and it’s opened in style
Royal Portraits: A Century of Photography
The King’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace
★★★★★
This show of official royal portrait photography – the first exhibition at the renamed King’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace – could have been so stilted, yet isn’t. The secret of its success? It takes the photographers as seriously as their high-born sitters, and traces the trajectory of a medium over the past century, as immaculate soft-focus effects, achieved in the studio by practitioners with first names such as Bertram and Olive, gave way to something more intimate and informal.
Of course, Royal Portraits
– which includes, among 160 vintage prints, several unseen images – is awash with glamour and familiar faces: how could an exhibition containing dozens of shots by Cecil Beaton be anything but? Its early sections are a numinous, natty haze of tulle and taffeta gowns, fur stoles, and peaked lapels; later, Princess Margaret – sometimes bareshouldered, always brilliant-eyed – displays a film star’s smouldering poise. Likewise, Princess Diana, who appears three times: once, in playful maternal mode; twice, flirtatiously close up.
It takes the King a little longer to demonstrate such ease in front of the camera. A double portrait by Beaton captures him as a chubby boy sitting beneath his angular father, who dwarfs him; delicately, a label refers to the “paternal dynamic”. Nearby, in a portrait released to mark his 18th birthday, he comes across as sweet but gawky.
Nadav Kander’s monumental headshot, though, commissioned by Time in 2013, is a persuasive vision of modern monarchy. In it, Charles (then still Prince of Wales) appears much brisker and more at ease than he does in Jonathan Yeo’s painted likeness of him – unveiled earlier this week – as a doddery regimental colonel drenched by a tropical crimson storm.
The exhibition’s interest in photographers and their craft also deserves respect. Labels are rarely sycophantic, but point out subtle material details, such as the way that textured paper can give a print a “velvet-like quality”, or that the “diamond dust” supposedly embellishing Andy Warhol’s screenprint of Elizabeth II is really “fine particles of crushed glass”.
Pleasingly, the show (curated by Alessandro Nasini) also reveals that women have long succeeded as royal photographers. A beautifully tender black-and-white portrait from 2006 by Jane Bown, in which Elizabeth II is irradiated only by natural light, is among the finest works on display.
Some consequential royal portraits – including a symphony in green by the German Thomas Struth – are missing, while a few that are present are a corgi’s dinner. (One lesson of the show is that you can spot a fake smile at a hundred paces.) Nasini could have been braver, too, and included family photographs taken and released by Catherine, Princess of Wales. For all the controversy that they’ve attracted recently, this would have brought the story entirely up to date.
From tomorrow; rct.uk