The royals have always touched up their images
Queen Victoria became slimmer. Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, lost her double chin. The Duke of Kent saw his wrinkles smoothed. The abdicating King Edward VIII lost his head.
As Catherine, Princess of Wales, comes under scrutiny for altering photographs, British historians say that back when the public had different expectations about authenticity from public figures and media outlets had different standards, heavy retouching of royal and other society portraits was commonplace.
“Very early on, images were manipulated,” said Ed Owens, a royal historian. The kind of things photographers do now with editing software, photographers did then by messing with negatives.
As if she never aged
Marks of a retoucher’s pencil show how Victoria was made to look as if she never aged. In the book “Queen Victoria, First Media Monarch,” John Plunkett writes: “Victoria’s waistline has been slimmed down by several inches. … Curves have been created where none previously existed. … Her forehead and an area of cheek have been thoroughly smoothed. … A series of lines on the negative darken and thicken her hair.”
Occasional complaints can be found about the retouching of the queen’s photographs, Plunkett writes, but those complaints also reflected a lack of surprise that retouching was routine.
Cecil Beaton, the master of royal photographers in the 20th century, was particularly skilled at enhancing photos to make their subjects look better.
When London’s Victoria and Albert Museum mounted an exhibit of Beaton’s work in conjunction with Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee, curator Susanna Brown explained in a video: “The final images which visitors will see in the exhibition have all been very heavily retouched. … Often Beaton would advise his retouchers to slim the waistlines of the sitters or perhaps remove a double chin. But these details were very important in constructing an idealized image. These aren’t documentary shots. They’re a much more romantic style of portraiture, in which no hair is out of place and every detail is perfect.”
It wasn’t so different from the idealized “mask of youth” paintings of Queen Elizabeth I in the 16th century, for which artists were tasked with conveying ageless beauty.
In his research, historian Alexis Schwarzenbach found Beaton’s instructions fora retoucher to remove the wrinkles from a 1941 portrait of Prince George, the Duke of Kent, who was 39. “Please do an enormous amount of retouching to all of these. H.M. is not accustomed to any but most retouched pure lines,” Beaton wrote.
The resulting image accompanied many of the obituaries published after the duke’s accidental death the following year, helping to “immortalise an ever youthful and attractive image of this British prince,” Schwarzenbach wrote.
Hugo Vickers, Beaton’s authorized biographer, recalled that one client objected to the extent of alterations on her portrait: Queen Elizabeth II’s mother, widely known as the Queen Mother. “She felt she hadn’t been entirely untouched by the passing of years” and asked, “Could Mr. Beaton perhaps remove some of the retouching?”
Vickers said it wasn’t until the 1960s that society photographers stopped removing everyone’s wrinkles and aspired to greater realism. But even now, he said, “The job of a society or royal photographer or portrait painter is to make people look good. Unless you’re Lucian Freud, that’s what you do.”
The media did it too
Although typically it has been photographers or their retouchers who altered royal portraits, in some cases it has been the news media.
The Illustrated London News did a little more than light retouching when scrambling to cover the news that King Edward VIII was abdicating before his coronation. The newspaper went back to the artist it had commissioned to paint Edward for the coronation edition, and the artist painted the new King George VI’s head on Edward’s robed figure.
“It was one of the first instances of ‘airbrushing’ a magazine’s royal portrait,” said Lisa Barnard, chief executive of Illustrated London News. One of the first — but definitely not the last.