Kerry Parnell: Painting oneself into a corner with divided opinions

We can’t control how other people see us, especially as a painting is the product of the artist’s vision – not a photograph.

Let’s hear it for portrait artists – this month’s beleaguered sector of society, as yet another painting hits the headlines for all the wrong reasons.

We have only just got over the Gina Rinehart vs the National Gallery of Australia furore, after the mining magnate asked it to remove an “unflattering” portrait of her by Vincent Namatjira – the subsequent news story meaning more people than ever saw the picture; when out comes a new contentious portrait of the Princess of Wales, which critics are calling “intolerably bad”.

Artist Hannah Uzor painted a picture of the princess for the cover of UK society magazine Tatler. According to the magazine, it’s “a portrait of strength and dignity”. According to the online comments, it’s “so awful, it’s disrespectful”.

Now, admittedly, Uzor – who painted it from Catherine’s video message about her cancer diagnosis – doesn’t seem to have quite captured the princess’s face and without the insignia you’d have no idea who she was, but I think to declare it “intolerably bad”, as the chief art critic of the UK Telegraph did, is perhaps a little harsh.

The magazine cover featuring Catherine, Princess of Wales, that has caused outrage.

It’s a painting, after all, not a photograph, meaning it’s the product of the artist’s vision, not the camera.

“I paint the world as I see it,” Namatjira said, in response to the fuss over his Rinehart portrait.

Australian billionaire Gina Rinehart demanded the National Gallery remove her portrait.

The fact is, we can’t control how other people see us, no matter how many times we edit our own photographs, or avoid looking in mirrors. Oh, is that just me …

And while we’d all like to think we’re a perma-youthful Dorian Gray, in reality, we look like the picture in the attic. Oh, again, maybe that’s just me …

However, while the Tatler cover was nothing to do with Kensington Palace and Catherine did not sit for it, Buckingham Palace did sanction the recent commission from artist Jonathan Yeo.

Artist Jonathan Yeo with his official portrait of King Charles III. Picture: Aaron Chown/Pool/AFP

His official portrait of King Charles – a dramatic modern interpretation where the King is depicted in a blaze of red – went down well with the subject, we hear, even if it has inevitably divided the public, who have dubbed it either a “modern depiction of a modern king”, or “resembling Dante’s Inferno”. You get a more educated outrage, it appears, with the monarch. (Quickly Googles, “Dante”.)

“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,” Yeo explained, adding it was Camilla’s endorsement he most wanted. “Yes, you’ve got him,” she reportedly told him, when she saw the painting at Clarence House.

The artist told the UK Times his teenage daughter showed him all the memes about his artwork on TikTok, having, “the best day of her life with all of the conspiracies about the painting, saying I’m a Satanist and Illuminati,” he said.

But he’s remarkably sanguine about it all. “As for people reacting … I got over that quite early on,” he said. “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.”

Hmm, a bit like writing a column.

Originally published as Kerry Parnell: Painting oneself into a corner with divided opinions