The weirdness of King Charles’ new portrait

As someone who can scarcely draw a stickman, it is hard for me to criticise works of art that may take many thousands of hours to complete. As such, I am fully within my rights to slate 99% of art created in the modern age.

I recognise the quality of King Charles’ recently unveiled portrait. It’s a striking image and the brushmanship – why is this not a word? – is obviously of a supremely high standard. Unlike many a modern creation it manages to bear a resemblance to its subject. In this regard, full marks.

Evidently the piece’s palette is its defining feature. Yet I cannot help but find it slightly perplexing. King Charles stands amid a blood-red hinterland, only his face and hands standing in contrast, staring out like some kind of King of Hades. Yes, it is referencing his ties to the Welsh Guards, but it's still a bit full on.

Where is our King? Has he fallen into a bathtub of tomato ketchup, or is he peering out from a raging inferno? It feels perhaps like one is looking at the culmination of a feverish nightmare, awash with blood.

Or is the blaze emanating from a nation in flames, as King Charles looks on, Nero-like, discussing about grass-fed beef, organically grown butternut squashes and renewable energy?

Maybe I am being unkind; again, I quite like the painting myself. Yet, for a royal family which appears to be struggling to maintain its public image after Elizabeth II’s death, I would have imagined something more relatable would be in order.

While the piece’s talking points will spur debate among the gourmands of culture, I reckon the average person on the street, seeing it pop up on their phone as they cram a Gregg’s pasty into their mouth, will wonder something like, ‘What the bloody hell is that?’.

Nevertheless, though his first official portrait is, well, weird, I doubt it will have much effect either way. I never believed that the royal family should spend its time courting public opinion; that way it will eventually fall foul of some triviality. The tawdry celebrity status of Harry and Meghan will prove that eventually: attach oneself to one wrong bandwagon and you’re soon offering up a few mea culpas and uploading an ‘apology video’ to YouTube.

But nor should the Royals risk isolation from the nation they govern. With his dabbling into globalist politics and his strange first portrait – not one targeted at the masses – one can see this is Charles’ predilection. It stands in contrast to his mother who was always going to be a tough act to follow.

Then again, the entire elite is bizarre and isolated from the masses: this is evident in the obscurant beliefs they entertain and the quasi-religious rites they follow. In this sense, society could be returning to its historical norm, with a strangely remote upper echelon largely alien to the lumpen mass it governs. The broad democratisation of tastes and values in Western society’s golden era – say from the Victorians until roughly 1 May 1997 – may have been the aberration.

Anyway, I’ll get back to my dinosaur colouring book.

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