Howard Morgan (1949-2020)

As a royal portraitist, Howard Morgan painted three Queens: Elizabeth II, the Queen Mother and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. His approach was sometimes unorthodox and seldom deferential.

While painting the Queen Mother at Clarence House, he accidentally kicked one of her Corgis. ‘It was like seeing a furry rugby ball cartwheeling between us,’ Morgan, always a good storyteller, said afterwards. ‘I was struck dumb. I didn’t know what to say.’

He worried his flamboyant style might land him in the Tower, but his relaxed manner seemed to go down well with the Queen: ‘She talks like an Italian,’ he once said. ‘She waves her hands around. She was always gesticulating.’

In his Battersea studio, he painted with foot-long brushes and paced the room singing hymns and sea shanties.

Morgan travelled to his funeral in a horse-drawn hearse. Howard’s musician son Alexander led the tributes to his father with a virtual eulogy from California.

‘Howard came from humble beginnings and a very austere religious family. His father, Tom, when not teaching at school, taught and preached his beliefs everywhere, from the beaches of Wales to the hundreds of letters he wrote to Howard.’

After growing up in the Midlands and being informed by his first art teacher that his doodles would never amount to much, Howard studied fine art at Newcastle.

Alexander told how his father started his career while living in a defunct convent in south London. The turning point came when Tory MP Peter Lilley commissioned a portrait. Other commissions followed.

‘It did not matter if they were royals or rock stars; he treated them all the same. Everyone was a fellow human being – except for traffic wardens when they tried to put a ticket on his 1938 Citroën parked on a kerb outside a bank.

‘Howard’s studio was like an encyclopedia or a jungle: a world of antique phones, toy cars, Star Wars models, muskets, fake moustaches, banjos and ballet shoes, the smell of turps and the heat of studio lights. You never had a clue whom you might encounter: a Middle Eastern billionaire or his brush-cleaner, a politician or an African art-collector, a giant or a dwarf, a magician or a musician.

‘He was so very proud of his six children and amazed by their talents. He was so very inspired by his first wife, Susie, and second wife, Sarah. He painted them so many times. True muses both.’ JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW