Jonathan Yeo: What the King thinks of my portrait - and why it’s so red
The painter trusted by King Charles has overcome tragedy and pays no heed to online mockery. But his daughter loved the satanist conspiracy theories.
When Jonathan Yeo was painting King Charles, it was Queen Camilla’s view he was most eager to hear. “People don’t know their own faces, so it’s much more useful to see the reaction of someone who knows that person well because they know in a split second if you’ve captured them,” the portraitist says. “Sometimes they’ll say it, but more often you see it in their face - amazement, pleasure or recognition.”
During Charles’s final sitting at Clarence House in November, Camilla came in. She told Yeo: “Yes, you’ve got him”, but more importantly he could see that look of recognition on her face too.
The oil painting unveiled on Tuesday - a larger-than-life canvas of the King in the uniform of the Welsh Guards - is his first official portrait completed since the coronation. It was commissioned in 2020 by the Drapers’ Company for its hall in the City, where it will sit among traditional portraits of monarchs. “It’s the most modern painting in the hall by a long way. Others are in the classical style and they knew it wouldn’t be like that,” says Yeo, when we meet at his studio in Shepherd’s Bush, west London.
The picture has proved remarkably divisive, lauded as “a modern depiction of a modern king” and mocked for “resembling Dante’s Inferno”.
Mirror Image
— SANTINO (@MichaelSCollura) May 15, 2024
Symbol’s such as Satanic Demonic Demons will always be their downfall especially when they are hidden in plain sight‼ï¸
King Charles
Unveiled his new portrait of himself looking like Satan Burning in Hellâ€¼ï¸ pic.twitter.com/L7FRn9hm3H
It has also inspired a flood of memes, to Yeo’s amusement. “My [younger] daughter was much too keen to show me all the crazy stuff about the painting on TikTok,” he says. “She’s 17 and ... had the best day of her life with all of the conspiracies about the painting, saying I’m a satanist and Illuminati.”
Portraiture is an art form everyone understands, so everyone has a view, I suggest. “As we’ve seen this week,” Yeo smiles, adding that there are only a handful of people whose opinion he trusts, including his wife, Shebah, who went to art school before becoming an actress. “As for people reacting afterwards, I got over that quite early on,” he says. “No matter what you do with a picture, no matter how obvious you think the story you’re telling is, someone’s going to read something else into it.”
Unlike the public, the King and Queen were not surprised - Yeo had painted Camilla a decade ago. “They knew what to expect,” he says.
The portrait has been unveiled at a pivotal moment for the monarchy, with the King being treated for cancer. Its vibrancy and modernity struck a note of defiance at a time when Charles, who was pictured looking jaunty while hosting celebrities at a garden party last week, is returning to royal duties. Yeo never thought the King seemed unwell. “[Our last sitting] was before his diagnosis. He didn’t look remotely ill to me and he looked amazingly well on Tuesday.”
For Yeo, despite painting everyone from David Cameron to Cara Delevingne, and his pictures fetching up to pounds 400,000, this painting posed some new challenges. “They said he has to be in uniform and I hadn’t done that before,” he says.
The bright tunic also presented a problem: “I thought the red will really distract.” His solution was to drench the whole painting in crimson. “That may also have had psychological backing, because I had a heart attack [in March 2023] when I was painting this,” he says. “But certainly none of that I was conscious of - it was just: I like this colour.”
In the painting, a butterfly hovers above the King’s shoulder, representing “metamorphosis and rebirth” as he went from prince to king, and also a reference to Charles’s championing of the environment. The medals on the King’s chest were his other significant struggle, especially when more appeared after the coronation. “I probably spent longer on the medals than the face because I knew what I wanted to do with the face when I started,” he says. “The more I painted the medals in, the more that was the first thing you saw because they were so shiny. I didn’t want it to be about that, but they had to be there somewhere. I would put them in, and then it would be too much and I would rub them away. It was push and pull.”
Yeo, who is among Britain’s greatest living portrait painters, had met the King in 2014 when he painted Camilla. “We already had a bit of a rapport and that definitely makes it easier,” he says. “He was really relaxed and I think it helped that he is interested in the process. We spent a lot of time talking about art and artists, as well as the environment.”
Yeo began the painting, which is 8ft 6in by 6ft 6in, in 2021, but progress was slow due to Covid and then the coronation. The King had four sittings of an hour each and Yeo also worked from photos. “There was a gradual shift already happening - age and experience were suiting him,” he says. “But I feel like there was a change in the body language [once he was King] and others have said that too ... Most monarchs have this knowledge all their lives: that they will step up to the plate but that it will happen when there is a tinge of sadness as well.”
Yeo, 53, whose father is the Conservative former minister Tim, was educated at Westminster School in central London, where he recalls teachers telling him off for smoking while rolling their own cigarettes. While he was studying for his A-levels, his younger sister developed a brain tumour. “They said she wouldn’t survive and she was in hospital for months,” he recalls. “She’s alive, but disabled and needs constant care. My parents - being very British - never complain.”
At 22, Yeo was himself diagnosed with lymphatic cancer, an upset he downplays. “Because of my sister, it paled into insignificance. It was just annoying to have a year of treatment. But you start to expect unexpected things to happen, and Dad had got in trouble [with a love-child scandal that prompted his resignation], so that was going on in the background as well. All this crazy stuff had happened by the time I was 23.”
Yeo, who never went to art school, says that his experiences encouraged his subjects to reveal their secrets: “Having had all this visible family chaos and tragedy meant people who sat for me would open up from day one.” His parents were supportive of his artistic ambitions, but his father advised him simply to ensure he could make a living, a sentiment Yeo echoes: “One of my artist friends says we all think we’re poets, but we’re actually in the luxury goods business.”
In his twenties, he eked out a living with portraiture when it was unfashionable. But he stuck with it and by 2013 Yeo had a “mid-career retrospective” at the National Portrait Gallery. A great portrait, he says, should reflect movement in the face: “The way you do the corners of the eyes and the mouth especially, you can get this illusion that it’s living.”
In recent years Yeo has dabbled in technology, working with Google and Sir Jony Ive, formerly of Apple. And then, on a quiet Sunday night in March last year, his heart stopped. It began with a “weird flushing feeling”, then there was a pain that spread to his arms. When Shebah said she would call an ambulance, he protested that he didn’t want a fuss. Ten minutes after a paramedic arrived, he keeled over. “I didn’t realise it was happening - I just felt I was going to pass out,” he recalls. “Then I had this out-of-body experience, where I was being led off and shown another world and you find you’re looking down at something chaotic. And it’s like: ‘Well, do you want to go there or there?’”
He points to the ceiling, then the floor. “You think: ‘Well that all looks stressful’. Then you realise that that’s you - you’re on the ceiling looking down, and it’s like: ‘I can’t go because there’s still stuff to do’, and the second you make the decision, you’re back in your body with the [paramedic] saying: ‘Stay with me’.” He recalls feeling “overwhelmingly happy” - and not just due to the morphine. So does he believe in an afterlife? “I do now. It totally changed my view on it.”
The cardiologist told Yeo the most likely cause was damage to his heart from the radiotherapy he had to treat his cancer. “I didn’t have any warning signs,” he says. “I had a medical the week before which was fine. But as with the cancer, I feel I dodged a bullet.”
One of his most intimidating subjects was the King’s father, whom he painted in 2006. “He was this fiercely intellectual but competitive and impatient character,” he recalls. “In every other situation, [Philip] would get bored if people weren’t rising to the conversation, and he would normally walk off, but he couldn’t - he had to sit. In an amiable way, he’d try to provoke me into an argument about politics or science.”
The late Prince Philip also kept asking about the paints, and it emerged that he liked to create art himself. He told Yeo that he would bring his paintings to the next sitting. “They were surprisingly good,” he says, relief showing on his face.
His son greeted Yeo’s depiction of him even more effusively. Viewing it in its half-done state, Charles - after mild surprise at the strong colour - smiled. Then, at the unveiling, he declared: “It is remarkable how it has turned out.”
Jonathan Yeo’s portrait of the King is on display at Philip Mould & Company in central London until June 14
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