King Charles’ artist Warwick Fuller reveals what life is like on royal tour
Life can be unpredictable on a royal tour, but the day the King of England served Warwick Fuller tea certainly took the cake for the Australian landscape artist.
He exchanges Christmas cards with King Charles and his artwork is about to be exhibited inside Buckingham Palace, but Warwick Fuller would not describe himself as a your typical “royalist”. In fact, the lauded Australian landscape artist has always been in favour of a republic.
It’s what makes his deep admiration and respect for Charles seem all the more authentic, and after being hand-picked by the King as his official artist for four royal tours – it appears the feeling goes both ways.
Fuller, 77, is one of a few dozen artists being celebrated in a new exhibition at Buckingham Palace, offering the public an unprecedented insight into Charles’s private art collection and life behind-the-scenes of a royal tour.
“It really is a great honour that he asked me back that number of times and has acquired quite a number of my paintings over the years – he owns 21 of my works now,” Fuller told The Australian ahead of the show’s opening on Thursday.
“I did say to him once ‘you must be putting these under the bed or behind a cupboard’ and (Charles) laughed and said ‘no, no, we’ve got them all hanging and I enjoy them every day’.”
A keen water colourist himself, the King began the tradition of personally selecting and funding an artist to join him on his overseas tours in 1985. Since then, 42 creatives -including Western Australia’s Godfrey Blow - have joined Charles on 69 tours to 95 countries.
Fuller has been named the King’s official artist four times, in 2012, 2015, 2018 and 2024, and has adapted well to the relentless pace of a royal tour.
“Sometimes I only had 20 or 30 minutes, sometimes I had a couple of hours, but it was a frantic effort every time,” he said.
“And that was the finished work, I didn’t work those up in the studio afterwards.”
Born in 1948, the same year as Charles, Fuller grew up in the western suburbs of Sydney before making a permanent home at Little Hartley, near the Blue Mountains. His paintings first came to the attention of the King, at London’s Panter & Hall Gallery, just down the road from Clarence House.
After four whirlwind tours spanning more than a decade, the pair have become friends, with the King writing Fuller a number of “beautiful, heartfelt, genuine letters”, including when his mother and wife passed away. During one private meeting in Australia, Charles served Fuller tea himself which “was about as close to surreal as you can get”.
So what is the King like behind closed doors?
“He is just an amazing man in my opinion,” Fuller said.
“And I’m not coming from a background of being a royalist. In fact, I was always in favour of a republic, but I have so much respect for the King because of the way he conducts himself everywhere he goes and in everything he does.
“I’ve had wonderful conversations with him, usually on matters of architecture and the environment and art in various ways, but they’re some of his pet subjects, and coincidentally, they’re my pet subjects.”
The King’s Tour Artists is included as part of a visit to the summer opening of Buckingham Palace from July 10 – September 28. The Lost Bear Gallery in the Blue Mountains will be exhibiting other work from Warwick Fuller from September 20 to October 26
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