‘I jilted a Royal artist... so he titled his painting of me Aging Dancer’
HE was the artist who started life in an Indian orphanage but went on to paint the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Queen Mother.
However, Norman Hutchinson, known for his charismatic reputation, was not one for fawning over his subjects, describing the experience of painting the monarch as “traumatic” because of strict palace protocols, while the Duke of Edinburgh was “difficult and irritable” and the Queen Mother tricky as she was “easily distracted”.
Now, one model has described how the artist had the last laugh after she refused to sleep with him, by naming a nude portrait of her “Aging Dancer”. Caroline Brown, now 74, agreed to disrobe for Mr Hutchinson after they shared several bottles of champagne on her 50th birthday.
She recalled how the artist first asked her to pose for him when she was nearly 40 but eventually persuaded her a decade later. “He said ‘can I paint you to capture this moment of inner reflection?’, then said it would be good if I was ‘in the nude,’” she said. “I thought I liked the sound of that and one Sunday afternoon we drank several bottles of champagne and he took lots of photos of me. He knew I was a classical dancer and he asked me to pose for him.”
When Mr Hutchinson later unveiled the portrait in grand fashion at his studio, he revealed the unflattering title. Ms Brown could not help but laugh. “I think he was somewhat annoyed that he could not bed me as he liked to bed his live models,” she said “This was his little way of getting back at me.”
She added: “I loved the portrait because I felt it captured my inner feelings, and it hung in the bedroom of my Bath townhouse.”
Ms Brown is now selling the portrait as part of her collection of 13 Hutchinson works. The auction, to be held on Dec 8 at Woolley & Wallis in Salisbury, includes his portrait of the Queen as well as studies for the portraits of both the Duke of Edinburgh and the Queen Mother. The portrait of the Queen was the last to be completed and caused a stir when it was unveiled in 1988. The Daily Mail captioned it “The Stern Queen” while the Telegraph likened it to earlier portraits of Queen Victoria.
The five-foot high painting hung for several years in Mansion House in Doncaster before a disagreement between Doncaster council and Mr Hutchinson resulted in the artist taking it back, later selling it to Ms Brown. It is expected to fetch up to £8,000.
The Queen Mother sat five times for Mr Hutchinson, who was the illegitimate child of a Scottish nobleman and his 15-year-old Anglo-indian servant.
“The Queen Mother (in contrast to her daughter) was not encumbered by her role,” Mr Hutchinson later recalled.
“She was difficult to paint because she moved around and was easily distracted. She was sweet and charming and had a great sense of humour and insisted that I keep coming back to finish the painting to the evident impatience of the members of her household.”
He described her face as “a beautiful moon with craters”.
The Duke of Edinburgh was the first royal he painted. Mr Hutchinson, who died in 2010 aged 79, described the late Duke as “difficult at first because he was very reserved” but added: “It worked out well in the end.”