Really interesting piece about the Queen and her image.— Idealised, gilded or defaced, Queen Elizabeth's image dominated our age thequeen guardian
Queen Elizabeth II portraits by Andy Warhol on display in the Lower Library at Windsor Castle, after being acquired by the Royal Collection.Queen Elizabeth II portraits by Andy Warhol on display in the Lower Library at Windsor Castle, after being acquired by the Royal Collection.Last modified on Sat 10 Sep 2022 08.32 BSTe carried her in our pockets and purses, jangled her and handed her over, put her in slot machines and bought soft drinks with her.
If anyone doubts that British people in the reign of Elizabeth II beheld her with religious reverence, consider Jamie Reid’s notorious picture of her on the sleeve of the Sex Pistols’ 1977 single God Save the Queen. Over a portrait by the romantic royal photographer Cecil Beaton, the punk artist created a vicious Dadaist collage. Cut-out newsprint words spelled out GOD Save THE QUEEN across her eyes, with the band’s name across her mouth.
Beaton caught her special aura in his coronation photograph taken on 2 June 1953. Gold suffuses this image. Elizabeth sits in her coronation robes, wearing the imperial state crown, set with the Black Prince’s ruby, as she holds her gold sceptre and orb in front of a luminous vista of the fan vaulting of Westminster Abbey. A burst of white light around the Queen’s young yet strong face seems to transfigure her – an effect only the cinematic vision of a Beaton could make work in the 20th century.
Even when they imagined her downfall, the artists and writers of Elizabeth II’s reign could not really feel antagonism towards her. Townsend, just like Jamie Reid, confirms the majesty of the Queen by the very thrill and hilarity she gets out of lese-majesty. Yet it would be wrong to think that in the reign of Elizabeth II, formal representations of royalty gave way to a new informal image. The portrayal of monarchs and their families as just like you and me goes back to the 18th century, when artists including Zoffany and Gainsborough in Britain, and Goya in Spain, portrayed monarchs as if they were middle-class people, or at least gentry. In the Georgian age, through art and their behaviour, the British royal family became approachable and popular.
The most popular portrait of the Queen may well have been Andy Warhol’s set of multicoloured silkscreen prints made in 1985. The artist also portrayed Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands in a similar fashion – that portrait hangs in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum while Warhol’s Elizabeths hang in the National Portrait Gallery. Warhol was not commissioned to portray our Queen; he just did so because she interested him.
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