Real talk: the more I look at and evaluate Jonathan Yeo’s “blood-soaked” portrait of King Charles, the more I love it. I’m not pretending to be a professional art critic or anything, but I love the sub-genre of “discussions about artwork done with royals-as-subjects.” Yeo’s portrait of Charles is thought-provoking, evocative and it’s just a really interesting painting overall. The fact that Yeo actually captured Charles is the icing on the cake. Compare Yeo’s portrait to Hannah Uzor’s Tatler-commissioned portrait of the Princess of Wales, and Uzor’s is found wanting. It’s not striking, it doesn’t look like Kate, and the whole piece is so flat and lifeless.

Outrage and opinions followed the unveiling of Yeo’s portrait of the king. Charles’s name was trending on social media for days as everyone dissected the painting. Mainstream, international outlets got in on it too, everyone wanted to talk about Yeo’s portrait. It feels like Tatler is trying to force the same thing about Uzor’s portrait of Kate, only everyone just flatly hates it. The Telegraph’s art critic Alastair Sooke called Uzor’s piece “intolerably bad.” Some of his review:

Sorry, who is she meant to be? The Princess of Wales? You could have fooled me. Even by the standards of modern royal portraiture (and there have been many abominable likenesses of senior members of our royal family produced over the past century), Tatler’s new cover image – an “exclusive” portrait of the Princess of Wales by the British-Zambian artist Hannah Uzor – is egregiously, intolerably, jaw-hits-the-floor bad.

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? (It’s no surprise to learn that Uzor based her picture on video footage of, rather than personal sittings with, her subject.) 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.

She holds herself with the bored bearing of an air stewardess about to begin an in-flight safety demonstration – which is additionally awkward, given that this was a job once performed by Catherine’s mother (a fact that, in years gone by, reportedly attracted the ridicule of William’s snobbish friends).

Even her outfit (which she wore to the King’s first state banquet) appears stiff, with that rigid blue sash restricting her like a seatbelt. Her tiara doesn’t sparkle and those diamond-drop earrings fail to shine; towards the image’s bottom edge, her gown seems to disintegrate into streaks of brittle wax, like something desiccated and shrivelled worn by Miss Havisham.

[From The Telegraph]

The Miss Havisham reference is WILD, as is the air stewardess reference, OH MY GOD. Sooke really hates the bejesus out of this piece. Someone else who hated it? “Royal commentator” Michael Cole:

Discussing the portrait of The Princess of Wales which appeared on the latest edition of Tatler, Mr Cole told GBNews: “It’s dreadful, isn’t it? It’s as dreadful as Jonathan Yeo’s red portrait of the Red King was brilliant and wonderful.

“It is really a daub, a most dreadful daub. But what Tatler’s doing sticking it on the cover? I have no idea at all. I think she’s got the garter sash right. Everything else is wrong. Certainly the features, certainly the deportment: everything about it. I have no idea why on earth that would be put on the cover of such a long-established, well, it’s the Toff’s bible, isn’t it? Tatler. I don’t know what they’ll think of it at all, and I don’t think it’s helpful either, because at this moment, as we know, Kate, The Princess of Wales, is undergoing treatment for an unspecified cancer.

“To have a picture of her, which might have been done by that man who did The Scream, [Edvard] Munch. Mr Munch might have done this if he’d thought of doing a portrait of the Princess of Wales. Now I think it’s best forgotten. I think it’s one of those magazines you just want to turn it over and see the advert on the back page.”

[From GB News]

Some of you suggested something similar, which is that Tatler was being purposefully shady by commissioning this portrait and putting it on the cover. While that’s absolutely a possibility, am I the only one finding this hate for the piece a bit… dramatic and performative? While Uzor’s piece looks nothing like Kate, it’s also not unflattering, per se. It’s not like Uzor depicted Kate as slovenly or squatting down to take a dump. Uzor captured Kate’s authentic “flatness,” her dull two-dimensionality. Maybe that’s why the royalists hate it.

Photos courtesy of Cover Images & Avalon Red. Cover courtesy of Tatler, portrait courtesy of Jonathan Yeo.