William and Harry portrait was artist’s ‘X Factor moment’
Artist Nicky Philipps speaks to Jonathon Hill about her life as one of the 21st century’s leading royal portraitists
“YOU’VE got an individual look, no question,” portrait artist Nicky Philipps informs me, analysing my admittedly peculiar features with her trained eye. “There are some people who look quite like a lot of other people and then there are others – those people are easier and more enjoyable to paint.”
Nicky, who grew up in the grounds of Picton Castle in Pembrokeshire which her family has owned since the 14th century, probably wouldn’t get out of bed for the sort of thing I could afford. From her studio in south Kensington the 59-yearold has painted the late Queen Elizabeth II three times as well as a host of other royals and statesmen. Trained in classical portraiture at the Cecil-graves Studio in Florence she is one of the leading royal portraitists of the 21st century and her pieces can fetch up to £60,000 each.
In preparation for my visit to Picton for an afternoon talking to her about her life I watched videos and looked over pictures of her painting many famous sitters posing beside her easel. I couldn’t help but be astonished at how she can paint them while listening to what they’re talking to her about.
“Actually that’s an interesting point because often people ask me what Queen Elizabeth II said about this or that and I think to myself: ‘Yes, what did she say about that?’ It can be very hard,” she responds ruefully, talking over a cappuccino inside the rustic Maria’s restaurant – a tapas cafe inside the castle grounds.
“Not even so much with the Royals but when I’m painting businesspeople, it can be hard to try to keep on top of what they’re saying in order to be able to ask the next question. It’s infuriating actually. Because I meet so many interesting and wonderful people and yet I haven’t taken it all in. I wanted to know so much about the Queen and I’d have loved to have said: ‘Ma’m, can we bin the painting for now and have a cup of tea together for an hour’?”
The whole thing sounds terrifying.
“It doesn’t get any easier showing a sitter what you’ve made of them no matter who it is. And I don’t like being left with a bad taste in my mouth.
I wouldn’t want someone saying: ‘I really don’t think my hair is like that’, to which I say: ‘Well it is – get over it.’ I’d go away feeling awful. I might say: ‘What about a hat?’
“Some sitters want to see every step because they’re so genuinely fascinated by the process and I like that very much. I tend to find that they’re the ones prepared to wholly accept what I do with them because they’re so interested in it from an organic point of view because it’s a human painting another human and it’s how I see them. It’s not as such about what they look like but how my mind’s eye is working. You do get men who want to look like Nelson or Churchill and women who want to look like Grace Kelly or Marilyn Monroe. But I’d be one of those too so I’m certainly not going to criticise anyone for wanting to look nice in their portrait because there is a longevity about it which will outlast a photograph.
“If they’ve got an issue, which might take a sitter half an hour to tell me about, I’m not such a diva to refuse to look at it again. What I’m not happy to do is to change something huge. I don’t want to be unkind but I also don’t want to flatter people. I’d hate the thought of someone saying: ‘Blimey, she’s done them a favour.’ Lucian Freud made little attempt to make anything attractive. You might say: ‘OK, well it’s the truth and life is ugly,’ and all of these various intellectual arguments, but I don’t want to be remembered for that. I’ve got one eye on making my sitters’ lives nicer. Maybe I’m being a closed book. A happy medium is nice I suppose.”
Her links to the Royals first came about when she was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to paint a double portrait of Prince William and Prince Harry in 2010 after she was shortlisted for the job through the BP Portrait Award. Clarence House had been especially impressed by her self-portrait.
“I got a call on a Friday evening asking if I’d do it,” she recalls. “I sat there and stared into space for a while because when you do something like that that’s your X Factor moment as a portrait artist.”
The portrait of the princes was painted when they were serving in the Household Cavalry. They are wearing their military uniforms. Prince William has a sword in his left hand while they pose conversationally beside each other. The portrait appears to have been painted in Clarence House but it was actually done in Nicky’s studio in London – though only after the police came and swept the studio first “as though it was a crime scene”.
“It was intended for it to be at Clarence House but I went there and all of the possible rooms were south-facing which is completely unsuitable. North-facing is essential if you want to paint things that look real. I asked the office if they’d come to me instead and they were very nice and obliging. These two strapping, huge Royals were walking in and out of my house in their regalia with their swords and spurs and none of my neighbours had an inkling. They didn’t see a thing. Or if they did they certainly didn’t tell me.”
How did she find them? “Sweet. So close. They joshed around like any two brothers. They’d finish each other’s sentences and they’d tease each other. They couldn’t have been easier or nicer, which made it the relaxed piece it is.”
The picture has acquired interest for very different reasons in recent years.
“Funnily enough it all blew up last summer with the reopening of the National Portrait Gallery because they’d decided to keep it in the basement where it still is. A journalist got hold of that and it ended up in The Times that the portrait had been buried because of Harry. The Princess of Wales is the patron of the gallery and she was going to reopen it so you could see why they couldn’t have it on display. The cartoonists would have had a field day. At the end of the day it’s their picture and they can do what they want with it. It’s had its day in the sun. I haven’t taken it personally.”
Not one to pander, she also asked the diary secretary for Buckingham Palace to move her assignment to paint Queen Elizabeth II for the first time for the Royal Mail stamp from the usual yellow drawing room to the Chinese drawing room on the palace’s highest floor.
“I did slightly throw my toys out of the pram but they were wonderful. Previous artists had painted her in the yellow drawing room and it’s really, really yellow. I couldn’t think of anything worse because the colour is reflected everywhere. The only north-facing room with a sensible window in the palace was the Chinese drawing room. It was very dark but there was a lovely white light from the window right at the end of the room. It was perfect.
The Royal Mail only wanted her face for the stamp but they’d paid for the full thing and didn’t mind what I did so I went berserk and painted an enormous portrait. It’s now in the throne room in the palace
“By the time she got to me she was 40 minutes late and I was a nervous wreck. She was quite cross when she arrived because she didn’t like being late. I’d been warned she didn’t pretend for anyone and if she wasn’t in a good mood she wasn’t in a good mood. It took about 20 minutes for that famous boot face to ease and she really did have a smile that made the sun come out.”
The portrait depicts her standing beside her corgis in the robes of the Order of the Garter, which she sat in for three sessions while Nicky sketched away “chaotically” at the canvas.
“The Royal Mail only wanted her face for the stamp but they’d paid for the full thing and didn’t mind what I did so I went berserk and painted an enormous portrait. It’s now in the throne room in the palace. I think she accepted it because it has her dogs in it. I think she liked that. She was quick to point out they were on her garter robes, though, which she told me was unrealistic because she would never let her dogs on the robes.”
What on earth do you say to the Queen when you’re sat with her for three hours?
“From what I remember she actually instigated a lot of the conversation. She spoke about her life and the palace. I recall how she knew every detail about her role. She clearly revelled in it. She loved all of the quirky traditions. There was something about the post. She was looking out of the window and was telling me about how the post comes from Clarence House up The Mall in a horsedrawn vehicle. One would think today some of the traditions were ridiculous but I thought they were really rather nice. It’s what makes Britain Britain isn’t it?
“She then began watching a man running around Green Park in a bright green tracksuit. She was following his progress very closely. ‘Here he comes again,’ or words to that effect. ‘He’s done 16 rounds now.’ She was very engaging and very giggly.”
So chipper that Nicky had to ask her to close her mouth. “I can’t remember how I said it. It was a traumatic moment but she took it well. I don’t like people grinning in my portraits. She realised I was under pressure and she did have a look after the third sitting and said something anodyne like: ‘Oh yes, very good.’ She was a master in not offending anyone.
“Totally non-committal and quite rightly too.”
In the months and years after Nicky’s first royal piece her world became manic. Interspersed with royal visits, her studio has become a revolving door. She now longs to get away from London and is finding herself in rural Pembrokeshire much more often these days.
“Have you been to London recently?” she asks, to which I reply that I haven’t for some time.
“Lucky you. It’s become a very difficult place to live. It’s terribly full, very difficult to drive around, and I would like to have a dog.”
Now trustee at Picton and all its 45 acres where she used to ride her horses with her sister Clare, who died in 2019, she wants to help more on the grounds while she’s also in the process of renovating her late father Jeremy’s cottage beside the walled garden, which she’s used up to now as a holiday home.
“I’m now at an age where I’m able to be picky and I just want to get out of London,” she says. “I often find myself thinking: ‘How quickly can I get down to Pembrokeshire?’ I want to be here and I want to paint here. I joke that my home is on the M4 but I do want to stop doing all that so much.”
It’s easy to see the appeal. Picton is a short drive from some of the most stunning rural landscapes in the country.
“One of my favourite paintings is actually of the shadows sprawled along Newgale beach,” she says. “I got up at 5am and of course the sun was behind us which created a wonderful image.”
It sounds idyllic.
“Yes. I’m not surprised painting is now used as a therapy because it clears the mind of everything. If anyone asked me to do some admin while I was immersed in my painting I’d have to completely reset because once you’re in it you stay in it. It’s very difficult to explain what it does to you.”
Her grandparents Richard Hanning Philipps and Lady Marion Philipps were the last members of the Philipps family to live in the castle, which they gifted – along with its collections and gardens – to the Picton Castle Trust in 1987. Jeremy lived in the cottage on the grounds for 20 years until he died in 2006. The trust is charged with preserving Picton, which is open to the public for most of the year. It offers numerous annual events, classes and walks and also hosts tourists in the gatehouses.
Nicky grew up wanting to paint the horses she rode on the grounds. She had no desire to paint people, she tells me, until she got to Florence and learned the sight-size method at the Cecil-graves Studio.
“I did two years at the City and Guilds London Art School but I became very dissatisfied with what I was learning there because it was very much: ‘Express yourselves.’ We were given anything. One day they turned the rubbish bin upside down on the table and asked us to start painting. I didn’t really know how to go about that. Quite frustrating in a way because I wanted to paint but I didn’t want to paint tissue paper that’d come out of the bin.
“I learned to paint properly in Florence where we were classically trained in portraiture. I went there on the recommendation of a friend and it was a shot in the dark really. All I knew was that I very much wanted to be a painter and I wanted someone to tell me vaguely where to begin.
“It turned out the studio in Florence was utterly mesmerising. It was a natural progression in how to train an artist. You do a lot of cast drawings to begin with – plaster casts of figures like bodies and a bit of torso, etc. You’d have to draw them and get them absolutely right. That’s training your eye. Then they’d allow you to paint a still life. And then a head. It totally transformed everything for me because it taught me in the way classical portraitists of the 19th century and earlier had been taught. I came back to the UK and practised on pretty much anyone who would sit for long enough. I’m sure they were bored to tears. But it sort of worked for me in a way I’d never have imagined.
“Nowadays people think you can be an artist without proper training. There was a school of thought in the ’60s and ’70s that training your eye inhibits natural flair because you’re not going to be able to throw your paint around. That makes no sense to me at all. Look at da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, Monet’s Water Lilies – those are three styles which are pretty different and unique and yet they’ve all been classically trained. You need that basic level of classical training otherwise you’re a house built on sand. It made me fall in love with it. I love having sitters. It’s like working with a really lovely colleague most of the time except they change every three weeks.”
One of her favourites is of the current Princess of Wales Kate Middleton.
“She was very easy to make look happy because she had the most fantastic dimples. Just a little shadow in the right spot and she came to life on the canvas. The best paintings are the ones done with the fewest brush strokes. I really admire Thomas Lawrence and John Singer Sargent because they would take the right amount of paint – quite a lot – and put it exactly in the right place with just the right tone. And that is what we’re all striving for because that is the purest form of painting: fast, deliberate and completely right in every way.”
She also “absolutely loved” painting Princess Anne whom she met at Fishmongers’ Hall in London.
“She’s wonderful. She was very matter of fact but had a twinkle about her which was fun. It had been a dreadful day. I had a family drama and couldn’t go to the sitting in the March so we had to reschedule to the July. She walked in flustered – probably because she had to wear the same clothes as she was in March and it was a boiling hot day. The whole thing was going downhill fast. I’d also forgotten that when the second sitting was rescheduled I had collected my paint bag for a sitting with Jeff Beck. I arrived to find to my horror
that it wasn’t at the hall as expected so all I had was this blank canvas and a piece of charcoal. My agent couriered the bag and Princess Anne saw it being pushed nervously through the door by the doorman.
“I admitted to her what had happened and she burst out laughing and just melted. She loved that it had all gone wrong. She was a joy.
“Old men are my favourite. They sit still. They’re perfectly happy with a glass of something and to sit and chatter away about their lives. They have lovely watery eyes and everything is a bit dishevelled and it’s all rather more interesting.” So she’d like to paint the King next?
“Ha! He won’t thank you for that. I’d love to paint him. Maybe one day. He’s got the most sensitive face and great hair. I also think he’d be a brilliant sitter because he’s so interesting. He has such a variety of interests. I think a lot more will come out about him with regard to how generous he’s been in his life.”
Is portrait painting a dying art?
“Well it hasn’t tailed off yet. I could say the same about your job. People talk about AI and all of this. I’ve brought it up with friends too and they tell me there’s nothing like the real thing. I think that’s very true.
“You can have a picture done in your own style but you’d know it was a fake. Who knows what the future holds? It’s a pretty uncertain business at the best of times. But I’ve had the best of times and I’ve had a wonderful career with wonderful sitters and I hope there are many more of them out there.”
You can read more about Nicky Philipps’ life and find some of her most famous portraits at www.fineartcommissions.com/artist/nickyphilipps/
Old men are my favourite. They sit still. They’re perfectly happy with a glass of something and to sit and chatter away about their lives. They have lovely watery eyes and everything is a bit dishevelled and it’s all rather more interesting