How to Paint a Queen: A Culture Show Special The Culture Show

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There are more images of Queen Elizabeth II

than any other person in history.

Many of them provoked strong emotions

when they were first unveiled.

I thought maybe it was going to ruin my career.

He was really concentrating on getting this right first time.

If you'd portrayed Elizabeth I in this way,

-or Mary Tudor, you would have been executed.

-Mmm.

The royal portrait is one of the most powerful propaganda tools

a monarch possesses - images of regal power,

dominance and the divine right to rule.

That's all very well if you're a king,

but if you're a queen, it gets a lot more complicated.

I'm going to discover how artists through history have grappled

with painting a woman in power and what that tells us

about our changing attitudes to female monarchy.

This is where you get excited - every time, again and again -

to be a historian. Are you excited at the moment?

I am, but I don't know what I'm going to see.

How can a queen be a terrifying ruler in an ageing female body?

When you've seen photos of her, you can't really knock just a few years

off her age, we can't have this air brushing going on any more.

And how can she ever command the same respect as a king?

Look at her. She's a monster with snakes in her hair!

And her breasts, are long, sagging, withered - like udders.

Throughout history, artists had to summon

all their creativity and skill to strike that complex balance

between femininity and power.

In order to paint a queen,

artists had to reinvent the very idea of painting a woman.

In case you hadn't noticed,

it's the Queen's Diamond Jubilee.

To mark it, the National Portrait Gallery's show,

The Queen: Art & Image, has been touring the country.

It celebrates the diverse portraiture of the last 60 years.

The most famous and controversial of them all

is barely the size of a postcard.

Freud was famous for never, ever flattering his sitters.

Here, he really goes out of his way

to avoid accusations of pandering to royalty.

We see this burly, quite dumpy, hang-dog monarch, with what appears to be

a five-o'clock shadow darkening her thick jaw.

This could be a granny with a perm

just about to pop out for a pint of milk.

Any artist who paints the Queen knows that they're vulnerable

to controversy and criticism.

What is it that makes her so difficult for artists to paint?

I've come to the North London suburbs, to meet someone

with unique insight into the process.

This is fantastic - immediately to give a sense

of Lucien Freud's character - who's he with?

Jacob Rothschild. And it was last summer, so it was quite recent.

The painter and photographer David Dawson was Lucien Freud's assistant

for two decades, until the artist's death last year.

How do you feel when you're leafing through? It must still be...

It's poignant, yeah, but, it's a good visual diary for me.

-Damien.

-There he is with Damien Hirst.

Is this the dog you're sitting in front of?

Yes, look, Eli posing.

There he is!

How wonderful!

In 1999, Freud received some news.

The Queen wanted to sit for him.

There's this photo, before the Queen arrived.

Dawson was given permission to document part of the process,

which took place over eighteen two-hour sittings.

For Freud, whose portraits could often take years, it wasn't long.

Often with Lucien, when he's in the studio he has two or three attempts,

so he was really concentrating on getting this right first time.

It all began splendidly.

He sort of started round the forehead and round her eyes,

and it sort of... Lucien, when he painted,

would work in small areas and build outwards.

-What? He'd make that bit quite finished?

-Yeah.

-And then it would just grow.

-It was a very unusual way of painting.

-It is!

It was fascinating to watch.

But not everything went quite to plan.

Painting the hair with the crown on top,

he needed more space in the canvas, so we added another inch and a half,

or two inches, onto the top of the canvas.

Originally, she didn't have a diadem at all?

She always... This was the pose of the Queen

but in the painting it didn't fit.

When does it become a royal portrait or just a straight portrait?

-Without the diadem and the tiara...

-It helps.

I think that's where it becomes fascinating

because a monarch, a queen, becomes so bound up

with a nation's identity, she becomes almost symbolic.

Maybe that's why he needed the extra bit of canvas, with the diadem.

Those two ideas, that bit, the crown, is the symbolic monarchy bit.

The bit underneath is the real person.

Breathing and living like all of us.

People were critical of this when it came out,

partly because they felt that this was not a slap in the face,

but that it was quite brutal.

Was he conscious of what was being said?

-Did he care?

-He didn't care, I mean he was aware

that there was certain criticism against this portrait,

but he felt, you know, he couldn't do anything about that, that's...

It's what others thought, not what he was thinking.

And what do you think?

I think it's a serious, very good painting

that shows the monarch in the 21st century.

You know, it's not eight-foot portraiture that's, you know, glorifying

the great and the good, this is a very real person

in a unique position, but Lucien's very aware of the history

that's gone through her family.

Controversy didn't begin with Elizabeth II.

When it comes to making portraits, female monarchs offer

some of the trickiest challenges of all.

It seems that when it comes to the realm of art,

royal power and womanhood prove

an especially explosive and controversial combination.

The royal portrait as we know it starts 500 years ago,

not with a queen, but a king.

In England, at the time of Henry VIII,

the idea of a regnant queen was unthinkable.

Women were simply considered unfit to rule.

Henry VIII didn't have a male heir

because 20 years of marriage to Catherine of Aragon

had so far only yielded a daughter, Mary.

So he was desperate to marry a younger woman,

but the Pope refused to annul his marriage.

Henry's dynasty was in crisis.

His solution was radical.

Break with Rome and declare himself

the Supreme Head of the Church of England.

Henry would replace the Pope.

It was a shocking and audacious move.

Henry had to assert his own legitimacy

as well his authority over the church.

To do that, he needed to develop some propaganda.

And his secret weapon was the artist, Hans Holbein.

By 1536, Holbein had become the king's painter

and stayed with him for the rest of his life.

Holbein's most powerful portrait of Henry VIII no longer exists

because it was destroyed in a fire in 1698.

But I think it's a testament to the artist's genius

that, more than 300 years later,

it lives on as the definitive image of the Tudor king.

The original Whitehall mural was huge,

but a small version still exists.

It's currently here at the Maritime Museum in Greenwich.

I'm going behind the scenes to try to understand

the power of the original.

The portrait was commissioned to celebrate the birth of a son,

and the assured future of the Tudor dynasty.

What Holbein has created here is the archetype of kingship.

Henry VIII is such an exaggerated idea of what the king could be,

it's almost comic. He isn't anatomically correct.

Look how broad he is, this big beast of a tyrant of a king.

And just to ram home that point that he was capable

of providing an heir for the nation, we see him

in this sexually quite aggressive pose,

and his codpiece is frankly enormous.

And on the right, you can see the woman who's provided him

with a son, Jane Seymour.

She's painted in a very English tradition

of how you present a queen consort.

She's more passive than Henry, she doesn't look at us.

Her arms aren't wide apart, instead they're clasped together demurely

just hovering above her stomach, her womb,

signalling that she's fulfilled her function

of providing an heir for the nation.

And this image would be tremendously influential.

People who saw it, they're on record

as having been genuinely terrified.

For kings in the future, this was the last word in royal portraiture,

this was the benchmark of how you could summon

a sense of monarchical authority.

But that's very different if you're a ruling queen,

if you're a queen regnant.

They had to find a new way to present themselves

that negotiated a middle path

in between this...and this.

In 1553, his son, Edward VI, died,

and Henry's daughter, Mary, became England's first Queen Regnant.

She needed a royal portrait, but where on earth should she start?

The answers lie deep in the National Archives,

hidden in a dusty old box.

-Check this out.

-Is this the one we want? This is really exciting.

-This is genuinely a good moment, is it?

-This is like,

this is where you get excited every time,

again and again, to be a historian. Are you excited at the moment?

I am, but I don't know what I'll see.

Exactly. That's part of the fun.

-We're gloved up.

-We're gloved up ready to go.

This is a document dating from 1553.

So, this isn't a colourful image,

but it is an image that's incredibly powerful.

It is one of the first pictorial statements of female monarchy.

We have here Mary pictured

with the full regalia

that a king would have worn.

The orb and the sceptre, the ermine gown.

And in many ways, the significance of this picture

is what's going on from the neck up.

-And she's got her hair loose, now...

-Is that significant?

It is, you might just think that was a kind of, you know,

fashion decision she made that morning but, actually,

it's loaded with significance.

Now, a queen consort, traditionally would have had their hair down,

in advance of the coronation

that they would have with their husband.

-And what was the significance of that?

-Purity.

Is it supposed to be "I'm a young woman" kind of thing?

Yeah, in the same way people would wear white bridal gowns now.

And, of course, the problem for Mary is,

she's not just queen consort, she's the reigning queen,

so, what does she do with her hair?

Does she wear white and, in that sense, is dressed like a bride,

or does she wear the gown and the ermine,

the purple velvet gown, that a male monarch would be?

So in a way, really early on, it's quite crude, the imagery.

They're saying, "Oh, God, what do we do? We've got a queen.

"We'll make her look like a king. And she's got long hair, she has to because she's a woman."

Yes. I mean, it's assertive, but it's ambiguous, I guess.

And that's exactly the kind of problem that Mary and those around her are facing.

A year later, Mary married the heir to the mighty Habsburg Empire,

the future Philip II of Spain.

She doesn't look at all happy.

-Well, she's not happy.

-She's staring at him like, "You're on my patch."

They're not honeymoon portraits, are they?

But this is Mary, and she's in the dominant position of the queen,

of the queen regnant. Philip is in the position of the consort.

Nut the very interesting thing here is the floating crown,

above and between them.

If I was an Englishman at the time,

I would begin to feel a bit anxious, potentially, about that floating crown.

This is how we are in the sort of months after the wedding.

Then...let me show you this.

This is exciting! What do you think I'll show you?

I think Philip's going to take over.

-You think he's going to take over?

-That's my guess.

Well, let's see. You tell me. Look at that, read the portrait for me.

He's in the dominant position, on, as we look, the left.

Mary's by this point looking... Well, she's lost the bloom of youth, hasn't she?

-Yeah!

-There is still the floating crown,

but that sword is clearly much bigger

and more powerful than this sceptre.

This is really big stuff.

Suddenly Philip has changed sides. I mean, what the hell's going on?

Who was truly wielding power? Mary or Philip?

Perhaps the clue lies in a famous image of Mary

commissioned by her father-in-law, Charles of Spain, in 1554.

The original was by Anthonis Mor,

and this is one of the surviving copies.

The important thing about this portrait is less Mary's pale and slightly insipid face,

and more that extravagant jewel that she's wearing on her breast

that was part of a gift that was given to her by Philip

in the summer of 1554, shortly before they got married.

So right there in the heart of the image is an emblem of the Habsburg dynasty.

Even the pose refers to the Habsburgs.

Because it's reminiscent of a very famous seated pose

in familiar portraits by Titian of Philip's mother, Isabella of Portugal.

Here you have Mary, the first regnant queen in English history.

And rather than looking like a sovereign, she looks like a consort

of an entirely different European dynasty altogether.

She's been relegated from her status as a queen to that of a bride.

Mary's marriage was a political necessity,

but it limited her power - and her portraits.

It was left to her successor to pick up from where she left off.

Of all the paintings of queens, it's those of Elizabeth I

that truly capture the imagination.

The Ditchley Portrait,

by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, is one of the most famous of all.

In it she's Gloriana,

the eternally youthful Virgin Queen.

The thing about this painting

is quite how remarkably strange it really is.

Because it was painted towards the end of Elizabeth's life in 1592,

and she's standing in this supernatural kind of cosmic space,

with her realm literally laid out at her feet.

So she is, compared with the kingdom, colossal.

She's in this strange area where she has the elements at her command.

There's sunlight to the left, and then there's a thunderstorm

and she can command both.

She can summon sunlight, she can banish tempests as she wishes.

As a piece of propaganda, obviously this is very powerful indeed,

it's really effective. But it's also something else,

it's awesome, it's odd, and it's quite new.

She's something dazzling and terrifying.

A radiant goddess if you like,

a symbol of power more than a real person.

So this portrait did a huge amount to completely reinvent

how you go about painting a queen.

40 years earlier, there was little hint of what was to come.

Aged 14, she's depicted as a young, bookish princess -

pale, cautious and actually quite sweet.

In 1558, when she was 25,

Elizabeth became England's first protestant queen,

every move scrutinised by powerful Catholic enemies.

She knew they were biding their time, and the threat of her rival,

Mary Queen of Scots, loomed large.

Elizabeth needed a strong royal portrait to restore stability

and shore up her own power.

She of course knew from her sister that a queen's image could all too easily escape her control.

Unlike her father, Henry VIII,

Elizabeth didn't have an artist who was up to the job.

There are a number of artists who are producing images

which don't show a regal-looking monarch,

and you've got a difficult problem

if you're an unmarried young woman who's taken the throne.

Very early on in her reign, in the 1560s,

we know that her ministers are really quite anxious about this and concerned about it.

-So they were on the hunt for a really good court artist?

-Yes.

Six years into her reign, Elizabeth's advisers drafted a proclamation

designed to regulate her image.

No-one could make a portrait of the queen

until that special artist could be found.

-They're really quite covetable things.

-You're telling me!

-You want to hold them, to...

-Can I hold it?

You... I'm not going to give you this to hold

because it's just so incredibly precious.

You can see it very close up.

The miniature was created by Nicholas Hilliard,

a goldsmith and painter.

We'll get a better look at it if we put it under this microscope,

which gives you an amazing view of the queen's face,

the background, the inscription

and the way that he painted her hair and her jewels and the costume.

This gives you a real sense of how breathtaking the skill required

to make an image like this is.

Hugely skilled, yeah. He's a really, really impressive painter.

'Elizabeth had found her special painter.

'Hilliard's miniature became an official image.

'It was to have enormous influence on dozens of subsequent artists.'

This one's called The Phoenix and this one's called The Pelican.

This is after the jewels that she wears at her chest.

And they're two images that are very, very closely related

by the same artist.

If you look at the face patterns on these, they're actually identical, but reversed.

So this is the same image as this, the other way round.

So he must have done a drawing of the queen to allow him

to paint these images.

'Tarnya's team had a theory that both portraits,

'and many others, all derived from the same source -

'Hilliard's miniature.'

This is a tracing of that painting.

And if we put it against a scaled-up version of the miniature,

you can begin to see the close relationship

between the miniature and the painting.

Because the lips, the nose and just about the eyes match up,

and the hairline matches up.

That's a good fit.

Does that feel conclusive that there's one source

-for the two images, or the three images?

-It does, it absolutely does.

And that we've ended up with other images

which use this face pattern again and again and again.

The research proves that Hilliard was one of the first artists

to be officially sanctioned by the queen.

His face pattern could be disseminated to other painters to copy.

It allowed Elizabeth unprecedented control of her image.

Her face wasn't the only thing she tried to control in her portraits.

Like her father,

Elizabeth was obsessed with another aspect of her image.

Clothes.

-Boots are divine.

-'I'm at Angels Costumiers

'to meet costume historian Judith Watt.'

That's beautiful. God, that's nice.

-I think you're going to recognise this lot.

-Oh, yes!

I see.

Yes. Ah!

There's a reproduction here of the painting so you can compare the two.

-Yes. Well, it's nothing like, is it?

-No!

I mean, if you look at this...

-her reticella lace.

-What type of lace?

-Reticella.

-And what does that mean?

Reticella is this cutwork lace that was imported from Italy.

This was essentially extremely expensive, extremely stately.

This is about formality and status. Out-dressing everybody else.

Because of course in 1579,

she brought in further sumptuary legislation,

regulating exactly what people could wear,

so she was always wearing stuff that nobody else could.

So this is a painting which has worked, hasn't it,

because it's gone down in history.

-It has commemorated her, we're excited about it.

-Yeah.

Elizabeth remained unmarried and didn't produce an heir.

She turned this weakness to her advantage

and reinvented herself as the Virgin Queen.

Why was it important she was seen as a Virgin Queen?

Because she was filling the vacuum left, by the Reformation,

whereby, you did not find images of the Virgin Mary around

in people's homes, in every single church.

That was a huge change.

The English had been praying to the Virgin Mary for...

you know, what, a thousand years, basically, hadn't they?

There weren't any nuns left.

Who was going to be the mother? This one.

The mother of the people.

I think that's fascinating. If you think about the Reformation,

previously, everywhere there would be images of the Virgin Mary,

that was the everyday visual texture of people's culture in life.

-That disappeared overnight.

-It had gone, absolutely.

-So she can play that role, in a sense.

-Absolutely.

It was a brilliant piece of PR.

I mean, she was worth worshiping, that's my opinion.

I think she was a great monarch.

The Ditchley isn't your favourite one, is it?

-God, no!

-I don't know why, I think the Ditchley one's brilliant.

Oh, it's magnificent, but that dress is really boring.

I find it tedious.

You're pulling out a black dress, in comparison.

-Tell me about this one then.

-OK.

So this is the sieve painting of Elizabeth in the 1580s,

early 1580s.

She's got jewels in her hair, pearls of course the symbol of chastity.

And of course the sieve here, which is this symbol of virginity.

This, cape, here, going around her

is a kind of masque costume, so it's fancy dress.

So ergo she's dressed as a vestal virgin, from ancient Rome.

So that is the story that goes with it.

So this idea of costume, which we see in several of the portraits,

almost makes explicit this idea of performance.

For Elizabeth, clothes were a form of performance,

-for getting a message across.

-Absolutely, in paintings they absolutely were.

This is about communicating her image.

The dress in these paintings is about delivering a message.

Elizabeth had developed powerful skills of propaganda.

In the last years of her reign, they'd be put to the test.

'As Elizabeth approached old age,

'plots against her became more frequent and more bizarre.

'Bibles were laced with poison.

'Saddles became toxic booby traps.

'The need for a strong, powerful image became a matter of life and death.'

During the Tudor period, being 60 and being a woman

was considered unnatural and abhorrent.

The thing is, if you were a monarch, it was something else altogether.

It was also risky.

Because a weak and feeble body meant a weak ruler and a feeble nation.

So Elizabeth had to come up with quite a crude but effective solution to the problem.

Which was she just started pretending that she wasn't getting older at all.

Hilliard was called upon to shun reality

and create a new face pattern - the Mask of Youth.

As she approached the age of 70,

the face of the balding, toothless queen

was frozen into that of youthful beauty.

The government called for unauthorised images of the queen

to be destroyed.

It clearly worked. Elizabeth survived, reigning for 44 years.

500 years later, we're still in thrall to this Virgin Queen.

Elizabeth I died in 1603, aged 70.

And for nearly 100 years, no other queen regnant ruled over England,

until Mary II came to power in 1689.

The thing is, after the sumptuous madness and all the strangeness

of Elizabeth's Ditchley portrait,

the way that Mary had herself represented

was astonishingly conventional and formulaic.

You could even say that she set the representation of queens

right back to the beginning.

In 1688, King James II had alienated the nation

with his unpopular Catholic policies.

Parliament wanted him out,

and invited his Protestant daughter Mary, and her husband William of Orange,

to start a glorious revolution.

It succeeded, but opinion was divided on who should rule.

Should it be Mary, the daughter of James II?

Or should it be her husband and first cousin William,

who had a huge army but was a Dutchman, possibly homosexual

and could only claim to be fourth in line to the throne?

In the end, Parliament chose both.

The idea was to combine Mary's legitimacy with William's military might.

William would take the administrative power.

Aside from that, it sounded reasonably egalitarian.

But the portraits tell a very different story.

As the leader of a violent and bloody revolution,

William was surrounded by enemies.

He needed propaganda on an epic scale.

To stress his legitimacy,

he borrowed heavily from portraits of his ancestor, Charles I.

It's your classic way of painting a king.

William is in the centre.

The whole point of an equestrian portrait is that

you see the monarch, or the Roman Emperor, in full control.

And he's trampling on these symbols of war.

To the left you can see Neptune.

Course, he's a very powerful god,

but he looks here like a slightly faded, feeble, weakling presence

compared to the star of the show, William himself.

The whole message of this is a full-blown baroque composition,

in which we're supposed to marvel at William's imperial prowess.

At his might, at his strength.

Traditional masculine values associated with a monarch.

In Mary's portrait, we're asked to marvel at something else entirely.

This is a portrait of Mary, not when she was queen,

but when she was Princess of Orange.

I look at it and feel a little bit sad, actually.

Because it's so deliberately confining

about what women in the late 17th century could be.

It's almost as though she's decked out in this kind of straitjacket of convention.

There are all of these tropes and motifs,

cliches if you like, of what it means to be a woman.

You have to be alluring, you have to be attractive.

So we can see rosy cheeks, bright red lips, come hither eyes.

Even in the background, the garland of flowers,

as though she herself is another succulent bloom,

something that will one day produce children.

Here's a future Queen of England,

and yet she looks like

any number of the beauties who dominated the English court.

To see what I mean, you just need to look at this,

another very glamorous portrait of an aristocratic lady,

which has got all of the same tropes and motifs and ideas,

which is essentially about aristocratic women

as sexy...almost merchandise.

This image of Mary remains the template by which

she was painted throughout the rest of her life.

From her coronation until her death at the age of 32,

Mary was celebrated in portraits for little more than her beauty.

Her successor, her ungainly younger sister, didn't even have that.

I reckon that most people would be hard-pressed to name this lady.

Queen Anne. The thing about Anne is that she has a very bad reputation.

Anne's contemporaries noted she was dull and dim-witted,

but her appearance caused abject horror.

Obese and notoriously plain, she had a weeping eye and a squint.

She was supposedly so ridden with gout,

she couldn't even make it to her own coronation.

She had to be carried to the ceremony. Let's look at this.

The thing is, she ruled at the beginning of the 18th century.

And this woman actually presided over

one of the most exciting periods in our nation's history.

The reign of Anne coincided with many great achievements.

The Empire expanded into Europe and America.

Architecture flourished, as John Vanbrugh built

the Baroque masterpiece, Blenheim Palace.

And literature flowered,

with Alexander Pope writing his groundbreaking satire The Rape Of The Lock.

While Anne presided over this era of innovation,

history hasn't let her claim the credit.

It seems her propaganda machine wasn't in the best of shape.

In Anne's coronation portrait, she sought to align herself

with Elizabeth I, dressing in gold.

While Elizabeth was a resplendent Virgin Queen,

the paintings of Anne are remarkably unflattering.

And even worse, they're boring.

Why is Queen Anne's portraiture

so seemingly dull, unglamorous and conventional?

Physically, she didn't, I think, look as she might have wanted.

So you think she was anxious about that?

Yeah, I think there would be a real anxiety about portraying

that sort of view as a queen to her subjects.

It was a pre-photographic age, though. No-one need know!

That's true.

But I think, although you want something that's idealised,

you also want something that's believable.

But it would have been so easy!

When you're commissioning official court portraiture, it's supposed to be flattering.

It does seem like she was the visual equivalent of having cloth ears

in not understanding that art is a brilliant propaganda tool.

Both of James's daughters were given a very, very poor education,

especially when you consider the fact that people must have realised

there was a very real possibility they would inherit the throne.

It seems for a queen at least, beauty matters.

I can't help wondering if,

armed with a strong portrait celebrating her virtues,

history might have treated Queen Anne with a little more respect.

By the late 18th century,

the Age of Enlightenment had transformed ideas about women.

Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III,

was lauded for her command of culture and science.

Yet, despite all her many talents,

in portraits, once again, it wasn't the queen's intelligence that was celebrated.

Charlotte was a great patron of the arts, as was her husband,

who founded this place, the Royal Academy.

The painter Johann Zoffany specialised in works

that were refined, polished and elaborate.

He was quickly spotted by the king and queen,

and this painting was his first royal commission.

I think, rather cleverly, Zoffany offers a whopping great clue

about how we should think of Charlotte herself.

If you look at the composition, her form and the colour of her dress

is mirrored very clearly in this triangular,

whitish, silverish dressing table to her side.

So Zoffany's not stressing her power as a queen consort.

Instead, he's stressing her femininity.

So I would call the tone of the painting

a piece of elegant sycophancy,

because it's really well done, but it is an official commission.

Unfortunately for her, she wasn't always going to be

depicted in such an alluring, elegant and beautiful manner.

In reality, contemporaries thought Charlotte exceedingly plain

and, increasingly, ugly.

Unluckily, her reign coincided with the Golden Age of Satire.

This is a far cry from Zoffany.

Look at her, she's a monster with snakes in her hair,

long, scaly, and her breasts are long, sagging, withered, like udders.

And she's protecting Pitt's private parts, cos it was said of Pitt,

who never married, he was stiff with everybody except the ladies.

And so here is Charlotte protecting the Prime Minister,

but not depicted in an at all friendly way.

And look how Charlotte is depicted again, with her ragged, jagged teeth,

very ugly with a prominent nose.

This was a depiction of a queen that was never really popular.

-So she was fair game to satirists?

-Perfect game.

But I'm intrigued about the novelty of, suddenly,

the disrespect paid to a queen, which is something new.

If I think you had portrayed Elizabeth I in this way

or Mary Tudor, you would have been executed.

No question about that.

And you would have been executed twice

if you'd done Henry VIII like that. No trouble at all.

By the 18th century, it was Parliament, not the King,

who truly wielded authority.

So this is a reflection of diminished power

for the Hanoverian Crown.

Yes, the Prime Minister of the day was a very, very

important figure and the Cabinet was important and slowly

the power was being transferred to those people who had elected mandate.

Yet Charlotte was facing more than the loss of mere power.

By the late 1780s, her life was at stake.

Here is Louis XVI executed in France,

and here is the possibility of George III being executed,

and here is Charlotte,

strung up on a lamppost with the Prime Minister in St James's.

So there were crises threatening Britain at this time?

There were great crises. There was real possibility of revolution.

All the crown heads in Europe were worried they might be guillotined.

In France, the king and queen had alienated their subjects

with their overblown, absolute monarchy.

To survive, the British Crown needed a new kind of image,

as far away from this as possible.

In 1789, Charlotte, still reeling from the events in France

and her husband's madness,

was asked to sit for the artist Thomas Lawrence.

Just 20 years old, this awkward young man offended her instantly.

Lawrence had a problem on his hands.

The queen insisted on sitting for him while her daughter read to her

but she appeared totally bored and grim-faced and a bit severe.

In a bid to enliven her expression

he asked, not unreasonably, if he could engage her in conversation.

But Charlotte considered this a terrible presumption

and refused to sit for him again.

It would take all his innate talent to transform his stony subject

into someone animated and warm.

To find out how he did it, I'm going behind the scenes

at the National Gallery to meet Larry Keith,

Director of Conservation.

X-rays reveal Lawrence's charcoal drawing from his first

and only sitting.

I'll just move this up so that you can see detail of her.

I don't know whether you think it's fanciful, but she looks more bored

in the X-ray, and here she's a little bit more alive.

I'd certainly agree that there's movement in the mouth

and there's a bit of adjustment, particularly the contour

of the upper lip, that could be consistent with

the difficulty he had getting a likeness that was pleasing.

It's interesting knowing a little bit about the sitting

and the X-ray allows us to see that transformation,

the whole surface is animated and alive, and that's to do with

the way he's actually putting paint down as we can see.

Yes, I think the X-ray to me suggests the way in which he

was able to add a bit of sparkle and to animate from that one sitting.

Sparkle's a good word for it.

Yeah, absolutely. The thing that interests me about it is this kind

of way that he could combine this amazingly expressive bravura

brush-handling yet harness that within an image that you know,

was striving for a decorum appropriate

to a portrait of the queen.

Every era has to decide where those boundaries lie.

The picture didn't find favour at court.

George III was disgusted by this, he said.

Yeah, he wasn't pleased with her hairstyle it seems.

It is a bit mad, the hair.

King George had missed the point. Thomas Lawrence was a genius.

I find it unbelievable that someone who was only 20 created this.

It's been painted with such assurance.

There's such an enjoyment in the whole idea of using a brush

and oil paints in the first place.

Lawrence has injected everything with this brilliant spirit of informality.

Yes, there are the classic tropes

and ingredients of good old-fashioned royal portraiture.

The big swag of drapery, the sense of a platform. But there's nothing

overly grand here. The swag of drapery is just a curtain.

She's not really sitting on an elaborate throne,

it's just a very plain and simple chair.

We're not in the presence of someone who's been allowed

to rule by divine right.

And if you think of when this was painted,

suddenly the informality of the image makes sense.

Because this dates from 1789 - think of what was going on

in France, the Bastille had fallen.

All of a sudden, if you were a queen, it was imperative that you

didn't look overly extravagant and grand and regal and out of touch.

In the last years of their reign,

George and Charlotte not only kept their heads,

the sober, pared-down monarchy won them new adoration

from their people.

50 years later, by the reign of their granddaughter Victoria,

the great monarchies of Europe were disappearing fast.

In Britain, dissenting voices were loudly questioning

the very notion of royalty.

Victoria took Charlotte's image of a humbled monarchy and ran with it.

Queen Victoria was the first ruling female monarch whose children

survived childhood.

Unlike Charlotte, who was a consort,

Victoria had to portray herself as both a mother and a ruler.

It was a tricky path to negotiate

but Victoria turned that weakness into a strength.

She realised the role of mother is the one trump card

a queen has over a king.

One painting not only transformed the idea of the queen,

it delivered her image to a completely new audience.

The royal family in 1846,

by the German artist Franz Xaver Winterhalter.

If I'm honest, it's not very fashionable to say

you like a painting like this one.

It's done in a very suave, quite cosmopolitan 19th-century style.

Technically, it's a virtuoso piece of painting.

To modern eyes it almost feels a bit slick.

But the thing is, I find this really charming.

I think it's a wonderful composition.

Because what we see isn't that old tradition of kings and queens

in stiff, fusty outfits and positions.

Rather we have Victoria and Albert surrounded by their kids.

She has her arm around the eldest, Bertie, the future Edward VII.

The second son Alfred is tottering around on the rug.

Albert's keeping a watchful eye over him.

And to the right you have this really beautiful mini group

within the larger group of three daughters.

Quite a clever detail on Winterhalter's part is

there are seven people in the group.

Only two of them look out at the viewer - Victoria and the infant.

And subtly, Winterhalter is aligning those two protagonists.

This is about a queen who's as much a mother as she is a monarch.

The following year the painting was displayed at St James's Palace.

Lord Palmerston, the future Prime Minister, declared it

the finest modern painting he'd ever seen.

100,000 visitors queued to see it. That was just the beginning.

Thanks to the revolution in printing,

the image would be mass produced.

These were very easy to obtain.

Some print shops said

that 70% of all the sales they made were of images

of Queen Victoria and domesticity is the idea that the royal family

are really trying to project here.

Victoria was desperate to court an influential demographic -

the middle class, newly furnished with the right to vote.

In 1860, she gave permission for the first official set

of royal photographs specifically aimed

at her new middle-class fan base.

When the first ones went on sale,

60,000 were sold just in the first couple of days.

The wholesale price was 3p a portrait -

that isn't really very much, even in the 1860s.

It's like you've invited the queen into your home

and she's there on the mantelpiece because these are not

images of power.

The royal family don't want to lord it, at this stage.

I think that they have reached the conclusion that ordinariness

is the key to their survival.

As Victoria's reign continued, she reached a new obstacle. Her age.

After Elizabeth I, no queen lived beyond the age of 40 until Victoria.

Perhaps the secret to her long life was her favourite tipple

Scotch in her claret.

Here we go, cheers.

Tastes good. I think it tastes good.

Obviously, it's got a kick.

If you are a drunk, this is a good drink.

She probably had one of these to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee.

I think she had quite a few, and I think she had

quite a few in general. Victoria didn't turn down a little drink.

The Diamond Jubilee was a moment of celebration,

but it was unsettling to see her age.

The big problem of course is that Victoria's getting so old.

People knew that and were panicking about what was going to happen

when her son came to the throne.

Was everything going to collapse?

Was it going to be the end of what they'd known?

She was this great queen, she'd been on the throne for 60 years.

By the end of her reign she ruled a quarter of the world's population.

It was all glitter and razzmatazz and confidence and the British

were so excited, but underneath, the Empire was crumbling.

How could Britannia rule the waves

if a quarter of its population lived in destitution?

On the Continent, Germany was growing ever stronger.

The dominance of the Empire was no longer assured.

How do you show most of all that Britain has to be feared?

That's the important thing. The rest of the world must still be

terrified of Britain and its might.

This was a question that became more important when she was old.

Because when you've seen photos of her,

you can't really produce those lying Gloriana-type portraits that we

have of, say, Elizabeth I, that knock just a few years off

her age. We can't have this air brushing going on any more.

They can't diverge too much from what everyone knows

she looks like, which is actually, by her older years, pretty plain

and pretty cross, really.

The last portrait of Queen Victoria is on display in her apartments

at Kensington Palace.

The artist Heinrich von Angeli deliberately presented her in old age.

I find it quite tricky looking at the painting though,

because I don't see necessarily a woman who is radiating

imperial virtues and strength and wisdom.

I see someone who looks depressed.

I think she looks even a little bored and glum in this picture.

She's this big dark mound of melancholy, really.

And the whole message of the painting for me

is that it points out how tricky it is for an artist to reconcile

painting a potent queen who's also very old.

And I guess if she is meant to be the embodiment of Empire,

then what she represents is a kind of steadfastness - the fact

that the Empire is immovable, and immutable, and perhaps, if you're

anxious about Britain's future, you can take some heart from that.

Over the next 50 years, the Empire was to change beyond recognition.

World War II saw Britain bankrupt and diminished,

trailing behind America and the Soviet Union.

Throughout, King George VI had proved

a strong figurehead, inspiring enormous affection.

His death at the age of only 56 brought the nation to a standstill.

The new Queen, Elizabeth II, was just 25.

Those around her were deeply concerned by her lack

of experience. The royal propaganda machine sprang into action.

This is a very famous picture of Elizabeth on her coronation day

taken by the society photographer Cecil Beaton.

This is a piece of patriotic national myth-making.

It's full of all the swag,

the trappings, worthy of sovereigns of old.

Elizabeth is wearing the Imperial State Crown,

she's decked out with jewels from every corner of the Empire.

If you look very closely, you can see the new Queen is wearing

these enormous drop pearl earrings,

and those earrings once belonged to Queen Elizabeth I.

He's trying to summon a vision of a new Elizabethan age.

As a piece of visual rhetoric,

Beaton's photograph is extremely persuasive.

But its DNA or vocabulary owes everything to the queens who preceded Elizabeth II.

In the '50s, images of Queen Elizabeth present her as a glamorous

young woman, who's nonetheless regal, formal and bejewelled.

But youthful beauty could only take her so far.

In 1966, the Queen visited Aberfan, in Wales, after a mining disaster

had killed 144 people, mostly children.

-NEWSREADER:

-The Duke described the scene when he first visited the disaster area a week ago...

It had taken her nine days to make the trip,

and the Queen was vilified for being remote and out of touch.

Her image was out of step with the '60s.

She needed to catch up.

You see the new era of informality in the photograph

by Eve Arnold and this is a really breezy, fresh, very beautiful image.

This is now the kind of imagery which seems a world away

from the 1950s.

It's not exactly a state occasion.

It could almost be anybody. It could almost be a member of the public.

This is a radical way of presenting the Queen in this much more

literally down to earth fashion.

It's a great photograph.

There's another great photograph,

which is just here, which is my favourite one in the show.

Which is similar - similar tone, similar feel,

and, this is, well... It says this was taken in '71,

and where is she? She's on the Britannia.

This is a photograph taken by Lord Lichfield. They're just

crossing the Equator, and the tradition is that you duck a member

of the crew, and soak them down, and that's what happened to Lichfield.

He kind of expected it and had a waterproof camera at the ready

and so when he bobbed up, he caught the Queen, laughing spontaneously

at this hilarious moment.

I think what I love about it is that she looks

so chic and glamorous. I like just, formally, I mean,

it's a very sort of spare image behind, it's beautifully composed,

I think she has very cool sunglasses, picked up in the porthole. There's a lot going on.

I think what this photograph really does is address the notion

that queens have to be very serious and po-faced

and rather glum figures,

and all of that is consigned to history and instead

what you have is someone who is vivacious and enjoying themselves.

But this new informality had unforeseen consequences.

The Queen's image escaped her control.

What do we see in this picture?

Here is the Queen visiting Princess Anne in hospital

for a routine gynaecological operation. It's nobody's business really,

and yet we see the Queen running the gauntlet

of a phalanx of photojournalists, all taking their photographs,

so we now have this issue unfolding in the 1970s where there is

a confusion between the public role of the Queen and her private life.

The territory opened up by the media was exploited by a new faction.

Contemporary artists.

Artists like Gerhard Richter based their work on newspaper cuttings.

Richter's blurry surfaces

evade our attempts to see the subject in focus.

Can art, he asks, really capture the truth of a person?

For Andy Warhol, the Queen became nothing but surface,

her public face complete artifice.

What we see increasingly through the course of this exhibition

and in the last 40 years,

is a tendency to hold the Queen's image up in a critical light,

and to pose questions about her relevance, her importance,

and what she's for and what she's about and whether we need a Queen.

All of these things are constantly coming through

the images that we have of her.

In days gone by, the Queen's predecessors might

have retaliated with a strong royal portrait.

The trouble is, in the 21st century,

an official portrait of the monarch no longer wields much power.

Why are so many portraits of the Queen

so exceedingly boring?

Perhaps it's their sycophancy? Or creaky paintwork?

Antony Williams painted the Queen like an OAP with sausage fingers.

The trouble with so many portraits of the Queen is that they

are full of all the regalia we associate with monarchy -

crowns, jewels and cloaks - but they don't quite acknowledge

that those trappings today feel a bit odd and anachronistic.

Contemporary artists have to conjure some of that pomp and splendour

that accrues to a monarch, for sure,

but they also have to reconcile that with a sense of someone real,

someone who lives and breathes in the 21st century.

And that is an enormous challenge.

Thomas Struth is one of the leading contemporary artists of his age,

photographing cities, families, and science labs, with precise,

almost forensic detail.

He's certainly not known for taking on celebrity commissions.

Can I ask you a little bit about what it's like

to take on a royal commission like this? Is there a risk,

taking on this commission, that you might lose credibility?

I thought maybe it's going to ruin my career or then everybody

wants to talk about the royal portrait all the time.

Like us.

Yeah, like you. But in the end I thought, you know,

I cannot reject because it would be such an unusual opportunity.

But what was the appeal? Why did you say yes?

It was a possibility to enter the ring of this historical activity

and see how far I can go or what my contribution might possibly be.

So from the beginning, very self-consciously, you're thinking

about the whole tradition of royal portraiture

and how this image might fit into that?

Yes, of course, yeah.

The photograph was taken on an old-fashioned medium-format camera,

which gives a vast level of detail even when the subject's life size.

I think this is a really fantastic piece, a work of art,

which you can't say of many, many royal portraits.

I think so many of them are rubbish.

I love this one, partly because it isn't overwhelmingly pompous

and it isn't sycophantic and they feel separate from us

and grand, but not too grand.

Somehow approachable.

You could look at them as parents, you could look at them

-as a representative of their generation.

-Grandparents?

They are actually the same age as my parents.

So in a sense you've created a portrait, a sympathetic portrait

of a generation that has had its time, in a sense,

but you're not brutally removing them out of the picture at all.

No, it's... I mean, of course, it's a sort of strange situation

because Queen Elizabeth you know is...is powerful

in a more foggy and less determined manner than

queens or kings of England have been before, so now

it's a question of celebrity, fame. It's a very undefined energy.

Warhol - all about surface. You - much more about a sense of depth.

In the end it's more interesting to see who those people really are.

Did you try and reflect that in the picture?

I think so. I reflect on that by showing them very real.

So you see the legs of the Queen with your blood vessels and you see,

you know, the neck and you see the hands and she looks

like a... I mean, she doesn't look like a normal person because

of the surrounding, but she looks like a person who will die one day

and you know, it's a kind of humble portrait in a certain way.

Perhaps by acknowledging the Queen's humanity,

we can accept her elevated status.

As usual with depicting a queen, it's a difficult balancing act.

Over 500 years, artists have had to negotiate power

and femininity, reconciling the roles of virgin, mother

and wife with being a monarch.

In the 21st century, it's become even more complicated.

During the 60 years of Queen Elizabeth II's reign,

Britain has changed.

As a nation we're much less hierarchical, we're more informal

and thankfully, today we no longer feel troubled by a woman

ruling over us.

And all of that means that contemporary artists

face a new challenge, which is how in the 21st century to make

a convincing modern portrait not necessarily of a queen,

but of a monarch at all.

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