How Artists Depicted Queen Elizabeth II During Her Reign

It was one of those photogenic, if historically insignificant, moments when one (genuine) icon fleetingly met another. Queen Elizabeth II met Marilyn Monroe at a film premiere in London in 1956.

The two women likely had very little in common other than age (both were then 30), global fame and glamour. A cameraman captured the moment for posterity, and luckily, Andy Warhol went on to do silkscreen prints of both women.

Warhol’s silkscreen prints of Marilyn are among the first he published, executed in the months immediately after her death in 1962. The silkscreens of Queen Elizabeth II, however, are among his last and less well known. They were produced in 1985, as part of her “Reigning Queens” series, just two years before her own death.

With the Queen’s silkscreen, Warhol was – as usual – playing with the idea of ​​celebrity and dissecting the relationship between subject and public persona. The image is based on an official photographic portrait taken in 1975, just before her 49th birthday. The queen, wearing a tiara, wears her “uniform”, majestic and beautiful, but also outlined and abstract in blocks of color.

The image is artificial, seductive and memorable. The prints – some of which were dusted with diamond dust and made in different colors in sets of four – came out in a limited edition of 40. Better late than never, the Royal Collection Trust finally acquired a set for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012.

By silkscreening her, Warhol bequeathed us an image for the history of art and – it could be argued – of eternal royal glamour. As with Marilyn Monroe, we are left with Elizabeth as a Warhol icon.

Like this Henry VIII was immortalized (huge, menacing, thick-necked, pale-faced, and small-eyed) by her court painter, Hans Holbein the Younger, could this turn out to be a defining image of Elizabeth II half a millennium from now? Warhol evidently felt a celebrity affinity with his portrayed subject, once commenting that he wanted to be “as famous as the Queen of England”.

As British historian David Cannadine once observed, the queen was “probably the most visually portrayed and represented individual that has ever existed in all of human history.” It reigned for so long that we can only hazard a guess as to the number of images.

Propaganda images of Mao Zedong (who was also one of Warhol’s themes between 1972 and 1973) were widely circulated during his lifetime, but he always did it to look the same: the benevolent founder of the Chinese nation. With the Queen, however, the images vary in likeness and a half – paintings, photographs, sculptures and holograms, as well as that famously irreverent record cover for the Sex Pistols’ 1977 single “God Save the Queen”, where the The queen’s eyes and mouth are covered by the song and band names.

The queen never had a court painter as such. The closest candidate was probably the Italian artist, Pietro Annigoni, who painted a portrait of her between 1954 and 1955, and again in 1969. His first portrait of the young queen particularly captured the public’s imagination. Framed by what she might pass for an Italian Renaissance landscape and clad in Garter robes, she looks beyond us dreamily but unerringly.

American photographer, Annie Leibowitz, similarly portrayed her half a century later in 2007. Wearing a long, lonely cape, the gray-haired matriarch stares straight into the camera lens. By now, she was used to everything, having been photographed endlessly. She has also been delivering Christmas messages on television since 1957.

During his reign, the formal portrait painted was largely replaced by photography. And at first, artifice ruled. Society photographer Dorothy Wilding, who took the ascension photos in 1952, focused on Elizabeth’s youth and beauty, and had some color prints by hand.

Fashion photographer Cecil Beaton, who took the coronation pictures in 1953 (and was practically a court photographer in all but name), went even further. He promoted a fairytale vision, opting for theatrical sets and some judicious touches.

Later British photographers – notably Antony Armstrong-Jones, the Earl of Snowdon and the Queen’s former brother-in-law; and Patrick Lichfield, one of her cousins ​​and the Earl of Lichfield – opted for informality and naturalness, and we got to know her a little better in the process. We were offered glimpses of the queen and her family in domestic situations, both at leisure and at work. Television crews began receiving unusual access to their documentaries.

But perhaps the real revolution in our perception of the queen came from members of the press – and their telephoto lens. They provided some of the most intimate and unprepared moments. We could see her reacting in shock to the 1992 Windsor Castle fire, solemnly and silently inspecting the sea of ​​floral tributes to Princess Diana outside the gates of Buckingham Palace in 1997, and shedding a tear at her funeral. sister in 2002. These images made her seem more human and supportive.

Two of the great (and most commercially successful) artists of the 20th century approached portraits of the Queen, but in very different ways. In 1967, Gerhard Richter produced an oil painting based on a published photograph. (The year before, he had captured it on a lithograph.)

As was the way of the German artist, her image was slightly blurred, the colors and features exaggerated. The queen looks unreal, if not surreal. She’s still recognizable, but somehow frighteningly not herself; she looks uncomfortable, as if she’s suppressing a nervous smile. It is unclear why Richter painted her this way – he never offered an explanation.

In 2000, Lucian Freud began to paint the queen. It was not a commission in the formal sense. The Queen’s former private secretary (and Freud’s friend), Robert Fellowes, had pursued the idea for some years. It took a lot of negotiation, but around the time of Fellowes’ retirement in early 1999, Freud finally agreed to do a portrait.

The sessions lasted for several months, between May 2000 and December 2001. When they started, the artist was 77 years old; the queen was 74 years old. The result, painted in heavy paste, was tiny (only 9 by 6 inches) and predictably controversial. Freud’s forensic pictorial eye was unwavering.

Freud had asked her to wear the diadem crown, as seen in some of Wilding’s photographs. The crown is worn at a slight angle. She’s thoughtful, a little down, maybe a little tired. She has seen and been through a lot. The painting was – as many newspapers pointed out – unflattering, the antithesis of Annigoni’s dreamy portrait of the 1950s. Freud gifted the painting to the Royal Collection. The queen has never publicly commented on her.

Would it have been to Prince Philip’s liking? Probably not. As an amateur painter, he knew exactly what he liked. His private collection includes a painting of the queen on horseback at the Trooping the Color ceremony. It was painted by his friend, English Post-Impressionist artist and royal favourite, Edward Seago. In the Grenadier Guard uniform (white feathered hat and red coat), the queen looked simply and recognizably magnificent.