Monarchy in the UK

Touring the three rooms in which the exhibition will be housed a week before it is opened to the public, it is clear, as its curator Paul Moorhouse is eager to underline, that this is not an exercise in hagiography. The very thought makes Moorhouse, curator of Twentieth-Century Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, London, cringe. “That,” he says, “would have made me feel uncomfortable.”

For him, the Queen is a subject to be examined like any other. Through her and the many portraits that have been made of her, says Moorhouse, we can observe changing values in British society, from the formality of the 1950s to what he describes today as familiarity. Which may breed contempt? “It can do.” At the beginning of her reign, in 1952, deference towards royalty and, more broadly, to authority was unquestioned.

Early images of the young Queen, such as those by photographer Cecil Beaton, show her dressed like a modern version of Elizabeth I, ready to repel armadas and relieve traitors of their heads. Though separated by 500 years from her namesake, the 20th-century Elizabeth is the embodiment of regality, as if she was conscious of the link between her and her legendary predecessor.

Less formal, but no less controlled, is an image by Dorothy Wilding, in which the Queen looks like a Hollywood glamour puss. Elizabeth, says Moorhouse, posed 59 times for Wilding, wearing gowns by Norman Hartnell. Copies of the best images were sent to every British embassy in the world and appeared on banknotes and countless stamps.

In the 1950s, with Britain still subject to rationing, National Service the norm and a prevailing tone of gray, the Queen appeared to evoke an era that not only predated the second world war but also WWI. Britain may have been in the economic doldrums but the message from Buckingham Palace was: there is still an Empire to rule. In 1954, she was painted by Pietro Annigoni; in the portrait she gazed out as if at “the world from a position of isolation”.

Slowly but significantly, however, the image of the Queen subtly changed, reflecting an age in which angry young men suggested they were less in thrall to the established order than their earlier counterparts. She began to be seen out and about, regularly attending, for instance, the Royal Variety Performance at the London Palladium, at which, in 1963, John Lennon told the audience: “The people in the cheap seats can clap their hands. The rest of you [looking towards the royal box] just rattle your jewelry.”

A key moment, says Moorhouse, came at Christmas 1957, with the release by the Press Association of a photograph of Elizabeth, still just 24, addressing the nation on television. Now she was no longer remote. Here she was in many living rooms in the land. Thus another layer of varnish had been stripped from the mystique, removed by the remorseless march of technology.

To many viewers this was undoubtedly the first time they had seen her, as it were, ‘live’. Other less formal portraits duly appeared, often by Antony Armstrong-Jones, who became Lord Snowdon, and who was to marry the Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret. Such images, observes Moorhouse, in which the Queen and Prince Philip can be seen looking dotingly upon Prince Charles and Princess Anne, designed to emphasise Elizabeth’s role as a mother to her children and the Commonwealth, were no less controlled. Nevertheless, their domesticity is in keeping with a realisation that it was no longer possible to remain aloof from wider society. But turning their backs on centuries of pomp and circumstance did not come naturally to the royals.

Hugo Vickers, Cecil Beaton’s biographer, notes that in 1960 formality and stuffiness were the order of the day at the Palace. Summoned to photograph them en famille, Beaton took a dislike to Princess Anne and was the butt of Prince Philip’s unhelpful suggestions, who wanted to take pictures himself. “I felt as if I were being chased in a nightmare when one’s legs sink into the mire,” recalled Beaton. “The family stood to attention. I said something to make them smile, so clicked. I clicked like mad at anything that seemed passable.

“The baby [Prince Andrew], thank god, behaved itself and did not cry or spew. It sometimes opened its eyes. But even so I felt the odds tremendously against me. The weight of the Palace crushed me. The opposition of ‘this heartily naval type’ must be contended with, and due deference to the Queen.”

Beaton’s bruising experience was not unusual, as artists have found across the decades. Invariably, says Moorhouse, when engaged to portray the Queen, it is a kind of power struggle, a battle of wills, but ultimately it is one only the artist can win. For as her reign drifted into the 1960s, she seemed increasingly out of touch and dated. Indeed, accounts of Britain in the 1960s make scant mention of her, often reducing her to little more than a footnote. In short, she was becoming irrelevant.

Her biographer, Ben Pimlott, recalls that a poll of 3000 people in 1964 for Mass Observation, the social research organisation, “painted a picture, both comfortable and domestic, of the Queen as somebody people believed they could relate to, but about whom they had no very strong emotions, one way or another”.

“According to its findings,” said Pimlott, “the Monarch was regarded as kindly, motherly, natural, charming, unhypocritical and unselfish; though a sizable minority also considered her obstinate, cold and with insufficiently wide interests.”

Another poll, exclusively conducted in Glasgow, found “remarkably little hostility to royalty – but little sense that it mattered, either”. Pimlott observed: “There was no antagonism, and almost no republicanism. But the popularity was passive. The social scientists who carried out the survey likened her image to the picture on a chocolate box. The photograph gives pleasure to some, while others hardly think about it.”

Such indifference was widely reflected in the media. Chief among the Queen’s critics was Malcolm Muggeridge, then ubiquitous on the airwaves. As Flower Power blossomed and London swung, the Queen, says Moorhouse, began to look “dangerously out of date”. A defining moment came in 1966 when on October 21 in the Welsh mining village of Aberfan a coal tip collapsed, killing 146 people, 116 of whom were children. With the nation in a state of shock, as it would be 30 years later when a gunman went on a murderous rampage in a school in Dunblane, the Queen was conspicuous by her absence. “She is negative,” a courtier later said. “She never says things like, ‘For Christ’s sake, let’s go to Aberfan’. She regrets that now. She would say it was a mistake, she should have gone at once.”

Photographs of her at Aberfan are reminiscent of her mother’s famous visit to the East End of London during the Blitz. She seems somehow unsure how to react, as if the part she thought she were playing had been erased from the script. After the Aberfan disaster, says Moorhouse, it was noticeable that her public appearances no longer generated the earlier sense of anticipation or excitement. Subsequent portrayals of her show artists, such as the German Gerhard Richter, interpreting the Queen’s image more freely.

Richter is neither deferential nor disrespectful. Rather he is equivocal. To him, the Queen, her face blurred, appears to be something of an enigma, an unknowable, unfathomable, abstract woman. On the other hand, Eve Arnold, picturing her in 1968, offers an image of a woman apparently content to embrace the ordinary, dressed in a coat you might be able to buy in the high street, holding up an umbrella, wearing a head scarf and smiling broadly.

This refreshing informality continued into the 1970s, following the making in 1969 of Richard Cawston’s mould-breaking documentary, Royal Family. A lid had been lifted, opening the way for other similar documentaries and, ultimately, the notorious It’s A Royal Knockout which, says Moorhouse, “backfired spectacularly”.

The Queen was now fair game. When able, she still managed to project an image she could manipulate, especially when the artist was, like Patrick Lichfield, a member of her extended family. In 1971, for example, Lichfield pictured her on board the Royal Yacht Britannia, leaning over its rails in a pose that reminds one of Marilyn Monroe or Princess Diana.

Typical of the way things were going, however, was Jamie Reid’s God Save the Queen, the record cover for Sex Pistols’ single of the same name, which linked HRH to “a fascist regime”.

We had entered an age of dissatisfaction and dissent, many of whose loudest provocateurs had been the first members of their family to go to university. Education gave them the right, or confidence, to be heard.

However, whether the monarchy was popular or not, there was no denying the attraction of the Queen as an emblematic, totemic figure. Her image transcends borders and generations, fascinating artists as diverse as Andy Warhol, Gilbert and George and, come the 1990s, Hiroshi Sugimoto, who photographed the Queen as a wax image.

The 1990s, which for many Britons was a decade of plenty, when cheap travel opened up the world and home owning became commonplace, were for Elizabeth II largely disastrous. She acknowledged that 1992, the 40th anniversary of her accession to the throne, was her annus horribilis, when all around her appeared to be imploding – Windsor Castle had caught fire and her family was at its most dysfunctional. But worse was to come five years later with the death of Diana in Paris.

It was as if Aberfan had come back to haunt the Queen as again she stood accused of being unfeeling and unresponsive to public opinion, remaining at Balmoral while the nation wept. Britons now, as Andrew Marr has observed, “expected and almost required exhibitionism”. Since she had come to the throne she had watched, doubtless in wonder and despair and perplexity, as the stiff upper lip gave way to the hugging of hoodies by government ministers. “To let it all loll out had become a guarantee of authenticity,” wrote Marr.

This transformation, Paul Moorhouse insists, can be charted through the portraits. One of the Queen, by Kim Dong-Yoo, a Korean artist, is made up entirely of 1106 tiny images of Diana. Chris Levine’s holographic portrait, Lightness of Being, produced in 2007, shows the Queen with her eyes shut, a rare moment of respite in a lifetime governed by protocol and duty.

Then there is Medusa by Hew Locke, who was born in Edinburgh, which takes Annigoni’s seminal image of the Queen and camouflages it in cheap and gaudy jewellery until she is barely visible. Locke first saw the image on his school textbooks in Guyana where he grew up. When bored he liked to deface it by giving it a moustache and spectacles, for which he was disciplined. For him, as for many of us, the Queen’s life has been lived in parallel to our own. No other person on the planet is as recognisable and familiar to us, and no other person has been such a representative of her times.

The Queen: Art & Image is at the Scottish National Gallery, The Mound, Edinburgh, from June 25 to September 18