LONDON – What restraint it must have taken Kate Middleton to cloak her youth and vitality in a guise of putrescence for her first official portrait as the Duchess of Cambridge. The unflattering painting, which critics have called “ghastly,” “dull,” and “lifeless,” was unveiled Friday in London.
The 31-year-old fashionista, one of the world’s most photographed women, is portrayed in a large dark canvas with what appears to be a forced smile and bags under her eyes…some have described the effect as eye shadow.
“The brief was that it should be a portrait which in some way expressed her natural self rather than her official self,” said award-winning artist Paul Emsley to a throng of reporters.
“When you meet her, that really is appropriate. She really is that kind of a person. She’s so nice to be with and it’s genuine and I felt if the painting can convey something of that then it will have succeeded.”
National Portrait Gallery staff said Kate Middleton and her husband Prince William visited earlier on Friday and were “very pleased” with the outcome of a painting based on photographs taken at two sittings in May and June last year.
“Her family are also very pleased,” Paul Emsley said. “To me that’s the ultimate test in a way, because they know her better than anyone else.”
But the public’s opinion has been sharply negative. Sensing a mystical ghoulishness to this artistry, the likes of which has not been contemplated since Oscar Wilde’s “Picture of Dorian Grey” first considered whether a portrait could magically capture the rot of one’s soul whilst freeing the subject to go about life without ever showing corruption on his public face, the reaction to Kate Middleton’s portrait has been severe.
“OMG, how awful! Rather than being overly flattering as many royal portraits are, this one is the extreme opposite,” said one Daily Mail reader. “She’s barely recognizable! Poor Kate, forced to say she’s ‘thrilled’ when in all likelihood, she is as horrified as the rest of us.”
Sunday Times art critic Waldemar Januszczak called the portrait “pretty ordinary … He (Emsley) made her look older than she is and her eyes don’t sparkle in the way that they do and there’s something rather dour about the face.”
Glasgow-born Emsley, whose previous commissions included former South African President Nelson Mandela, knew he would be in the public eye when taking on a subject of the duchess’s stature as a royal and global celebrity.
“It’s probably the most important portrait I’ll ever do, and when you realize that, you do start to think rather carefully about what you’re doing perhaps more than you usually do, and that made me more cautious than I normally am.”
The National Portrait Gallery commissioned the painting of its patron, and it was given to the gallery by Hugh Leggatt through the Art Fund.