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Tag: Hans Holbein

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The Royal Coronation Portraits

Coronation portrait of Queen Camilla, 2025, Paul S. Benney, courtesy National Gallery

By the time you read this, King Charles’ and Queen Camilla’s coronation portraits will have been picked over by the media. They aren’t innovative, thank goodness, because official portraits shouldn’t be.

Camilla’s coronation portrait is more accessible, but then again, she takes the better photo. Her painting has long sweeping diagonals and painter Paul S. Benney has managed to give her a hauteur she never achieves in life. There’s just enough pattern in the regalia to set off the simplified form of dress and background. Of course, her dowager’s figure has lost about twenty years, but that’s typical. If there’s anything I don’t get, it’s why her hands are so small.

Coronation portrait of King Charles III, 2025, Peter Kuhfield, courtesy National Gallery

Charles’ coronation portrait, by Peter Kuhfield, is more complicated, and I think that makes it a better psychological portrait. His regalia is wearing him, which is how I picture him each time he makes a public appearance in his three-piece grey suit, top hat, umbrella, tie pin, boutonniere, pocket square and glace shoes. He’s always dapper, but he’s a shrinking, rounded, elderly man and has allowed himself to be painted so.

In the portrait, his face is in shadow, without distinct modeling. He’s been struggling with cancer for two years. For Kuhfield to have captured that sense of fading away is insightful, sad and terrible.

Pity the poor person tasked with doing a portrait of a king or queen. Portraits are difficult enough. Add to that the demands and demanding schedules of princes of the realm. Clothing and figure will done with stand-ins or mannikins (as was the case with Nelson Shanks’ portrait of Princess Diana).

Hans Holbein did a drawing of Henry VIII which was widely copied by other artists in lieu of getting the king to sit at all. In his older years, the king was infamously irascible, cruel, and intolerant, with a noted inclination toward murder. It’s no surprise portrait painters kept their distance.

While not a coronation portrait, the Armada Portrait, c. 1588, is a fierce statement of Elizabeth I’s authority. The globe represents England’s imperial might. She faces the calm English seas, and away from the storms of Catholic Europe. And the mermaid symbolizes her power to sink those Spanish ships. The imperial crown asserts Elizabeth’s right to rule. And all those pearls associate her with Artemis.

Until the age of photography, all we knew about kings and queens was what we learned from their paintings. Thus we believe Anne of Cleves was beautiful because Holbein painted her that way. That was despite Henry complaining that, “She is nothing so fair as she hath been reported…  [if] it were not that she had come so far into my realm, and the great preparations and state that my people have made for her, and for fear of making a ruffle in the world and of driving her brother into the arms of the Emperor and the French King, I would not now marry her. But now it is too far gone, wherefore I am sorry.” What a mensch.

Queen Elizabeth II, semi-mette cibachrome print, 2 June 1953, Cecil Beaton, courtesy Victoria and Albert Museum, London. While this was taken on the day of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, it was actually shot at Buckingham Palace. Beaton dubbed in the Lady Chapel at Westminster Abbey in his darkroom.

Queen Elizabeth’s coronation portrait

Queen Elizabeth II had some real stinkers painted of her, among the worst being by Lucien Freud in 2001. Freud’s error, I think, is in trying to impose a psychological state on her portrait. A famously private woman, she wasn’t giving anything away. The best are the 1955 Pietro Annigoni portrait and Andy Warhol’s 1985 screenprint, which don’t try to pierce that screen.

But it’s in her photographic portraits by fashion photographer Cecil Beaton that we see something of the woman behind the throne. Theirs was a long relationship. Elizabeth first sat for Beaton in 1942. Over the next three decades he photographed the Queen on many significant occasions, including her Coronation Day in 1953. But he also took pictures of her family life, and there’s an intimacy to his pictures that paintings don’t seem to capture.

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What is art?

This 9X12 painting of spring blossoms in Thomaston is one of four paintings I delivered to the Red Barn Gallery in Thomaston. They’ll be there until August 6, 2023.

‘What is art?’ is a deceptively simple question. I come down hard on the argument that art is any creative impulse that is utterly useless in practical terms. Art is created primarily for aesthetic, intellectual or expressive purposes. It evokes emotions, conveys ideas and, hopefully, provokes thought.

Craft, on the other hand, is traditionally used to describe work that serves a practical purpose. Of course, the line between art and craft is hopelessly vague and jagged. There was no legitimate purpose served by the exquisite illumination of the Lindisfarne Gospels; the stories were read out to an audience who probably couldn’t read and never had a chance to look at the pictures. The illumination was just a celebration of the magnificence of the Good News. But we call those unknown artists ‘medieval craftsmen.’

Red House, Monhegan, 12X16, oil on canvas, is one of four paintings I delivered to Red Barn Gallery in Port Clyde. They’ll be there until August 6.

In late medieval Europe, tapestry was the central, most expensive figurative medium. Tapestries often showed complicated Biblical, allegorical or historical scenes. They were full of beautifully drawn figures in well-drafted settings.

These immense wall hangings were made in large workshops under the aegis of a master artist. Their production was not materially different from the painting workshops that would follow in the Renaissance. However, tapestry was based on two very practical crafts, weaving and needlework. We’ve further muddied the waters by assuming that the magnificent tapestries of our ancestors were primarily to keep drafts down. We call tapestry a craft, even though its technical demands are at least equal to those of painting.

Hans Holbein traipsed all over Europe to paint portraits of prospective brides for Henry VIII. (The king was terribly disappointed in Anne of Cleves when he saw her in the flesh, so much that the marriage was unconsummated. But he was the only person who thought her homely, so we’ll never know if Holbein flattered her or if Henry was unreasonable.)

Holbein’s paintings were made for a highly practical application, but they’re among the great paintings of the western canon. Nobody would call them craft.

Rockport Opera House, 14X18, is one of four paintings I delivered to Red Barn Gallery in Port Clyde. They’ll be there until August 6.

Consider three tiny figurines, exactly the same. The first was made as a doll for a child. It’s by our modern lights a craft object. The second was made to cast a spell upon an unlucky recipient. That’s also a craft object. The third was made for no reason other than that its maker thought it was a good idea. That’s an art object.

I may not like a Maurizio Cattelan‘s Comedian (the infamous banana taped to a wall) but it provoked a response and a lot of conversation. That’s one of the fundamental purposes of art. Could I have enraged as many people with a landscape painting? Hardly.

A large part of the game Warhammer 40,000 is painting miniatures. Is that a craft, because it’s for a game, or art, because it’s totally useless? Is building a model of Frederic Church‘s Olana in The Sims, as my daft daughter is doing, art or craft?

I’ve spent a few weeks at the Red Barn Gallery in Port Clyde contemplating a vivid and sublime Eric Jacobsen painting. It has been a true aesthetic pleasure. Beauty is something both traditional art and craft do magnificently. It’s something a banana taped to the wall (and much other modern art) fail at. To divorce aesthetics from art is as foolish as trying to draw a line between art and craft.

We’d love to have you enter this year’s 10X10 show. Details below.

Speaking of the Red Barn Gallery, intake for the annual 10X10 show starts this Thursday. It’s a juried show that runs from August 11-September 1. Artists can submit up to three works, and the fee is $15/per submission. The application form is here.

I’ll be there on Thursday, and I’d love to see you!

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025: