This is the portrait of an intelligent, thoughtful and educated sitter with no less than a degree in art history. It
is perfectly adequate for the boardroom of a supermarket but entirely inadequate for a national collection. Kate deserves 404 Not Found
an artist, not a slavish and banal illustrator and certainly <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, shrink-to-fit=no" /> not the bargain basement of royal portraiture. It is an artless mistake that should have been foreseeable by those who commissioned it. Emsley was the wrong painter. He is essentially a wildlife artist used to painting every hair on a gorilla. We have fine portrait painters in this country – Ben Sullivan, Phil Hale, Stuart Pearson Wright and Paul Benney among them. Any <p>The resource requested could not be found on this server!</p> of these artists would have produced something more taxing, deeper, and <h1 style="margin:0; font-size:150px; line-height:150px; font-weight:bold;">404</h1> interesting than this. We could have been surprised by an artist with something <!DOCTYPE html> to say.</p>
<p>We are <html style="height:100%"> not asking for </h2> any surreal or bizarre interpretation but merely for <em>something beyond a bog-standard </div></div><div style="color:#f0f0f0; font-size:12px;margin:auto;padding:0px 30px 0px 30px;position:relative;clear:both;height:100px;margin-top:-101px;background-color:#474747;border-top: 1px solid rgba(0,0,0,0.15);box-shadow: 0 1px 0 rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.3) inset;"> likeness</em>. This is the most bland and predictable royal portrait in living memory. It is the sort of safe, uncomplicated, pedestrian image one might expect to see in a high street photographer’s window. It looks as if the painter asked the subject to “Say cheese!” and then told her to scram and buy some clothes while he painted the photograph.</p>
<p>It would have been cheaper <body style="color: #444; margin:0;font: normal 14px/20px Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; height:100%; background-color: #fff;"> and more honest to exhibit a photograph; indeed this portrait adds nothing that we didn’t already know from a million photographs. Even her smile is half-hearted. There is neither <head> character nor personality here beyond the obvious. Neither is there gravitas, profundity or any sense of narrative. Instead it is the image we see repeated daily in our newspapers and magazines.
Not Found better. We deserve better too, and so does the future.
This commission – Kate’s first official portrait – demanded
Saving grace? It is not by Rolf Harris.
David Lee
The Jackdaw January 2013
