The furor over the painting points to the Crown’s deeper problems.
As far back as the 1500s, the British Royal Family has used formal portraits to project a positive and authoritative image. Their most recent entry, however, is giving audiences a very different impression, the latest in a series of public relations blunders at a tenuous time for the monarchy.
The new portrait of King Charles, by British artist Jonathan Yeo, features the monarch looking on serenely while wearing a red Welsh Guards uniform against a red backdrop. Aside from his hands and face, the portrait is covered in red paint strokes, a visual that for some onlookers, recalled flames, blood, and horror films.
“It looks like he’s bathing in blood,” a commenter quipped on an Instagram post announcing the portrait. “To me it gives the message the monarchy is going up in flames or the king is burning in hell,” another commenter wrote.
In his description of the painting, Yeo says a chief aim was to capture Charles’s evolution as a leader and ascension to the throne. The painting also includes a butterfly hovering above Charles’s right shoulder, an addition the king reportedly suggested himself to illustrate his transformation and commitment to environmental causes.
For some, the bold palette of the painting conjured more brutal aspects of the monarchy’s history, however. Certain observers have interpreted the work as a reminder of the Crown’s bloody advancement of colonialism. “It almost alludes to some sort of massacre that he’s been part of,” Tabish Khan, a London art critic, told Business Insider. “Given the royal family’s history and ties to colonialism and imperialism, it’s not hard for people to look at it and then make the leap that it’s somehow related to that.”
And while much of the response has been poking fun at the portrait, the controversy also points to deeper issues the monarchy faces, as it navigates an uncertain transition after Queen Elizabeth II’s death and grapples with its own past. The painting aimed to capture Charles’s transformation
Yeo, an established artist who has also painted former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair as well as Charles’s father Prince Philip and his wife Queen Camilla, sat with Charles four times for his first portrait as King.
