Why does the new Kate Middleton portrait look nothing like her? The new Hannah Uzor painting commissioned by ‘Tatler’ may aim to capture Princess Catherine’s ‘soul’ rather than her likeness. Or maybe weird royal portraits are just in right now.
Kensington Palace offered the first Kate Middleton health update since she announced her cancer diagnosis in March. And the news is basically that there’s no news. Following speculation that Catherine, the Princess of Wales, might soon resume public duties, a Kensington Palace spokesman told the BBC: “The princess is not expected to return to work until it’s cleared by her medical team.”
So it seems we won’t be seeing the princess anytime soon. But the public did get a new look at her — though it was a bit hard to tell. On Wednesday, Tatler magazine released its July cover, which features a portrait of the princess painted by British-Zambian artist Hannah Uzor.
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Online commentators and a handful of actual art critics were quick to note that the portrait looks absolutely nothing like Kate. The Daily Telegraph’s chief art critic, Alastair Sooke, deemed it “egregiously, intolerably, jaw-hits-the-floor bad.” He elaborated:
I’ve spent the past hour or so – time, incidentally, that I will never get back – scrutinising Uzor’s “likeness”, and, still, I cannot divine any flicker of resemblance between it and the woman it’s supposed to depict. At first, my editor thought it was meant to represent Meghan, Duchess of Sussex; its subject’s smirk made me think, initially, of Anne Robinson fronting The Weakest Link.
Has there been a flatter, more lifeless royal portrait in living memory? … Beneath a Lego-like helmet of unmodulated, monotonously brown “hair”, this Princess of Wales has as much charisma as a naff figurine atop a wedding cake.
