"Something Is Funny with the Mouth": Royal Portrait Controversies and the Meaning and Purpose of Art
Above: Portrait of King Charles III by Jonathan Yeo; Spanish fresco of Jesus altered by Cecelia Jiminez; “Capricorn” sculpture of a royal family by Max Ernst; Tatler commissioned painting of Princess Kate of Wales by artist Hannah Uzor
With all the foofaraw about the latest portraits of the Princess of Wales and King Charles III, which have gotten much attention and criticism, something a fine artist friend of mine once said came to mind: she didn’t like painting portraits, and cited famous artist John Singer Sargent’s famous quote that a portrait is a picture of someone where “something is funny with the mouth.”
(Some of John Singer Sergeant’s most well-known portraits, below):
Never have those words struck me more than this past month, when on top of the kerfluffle over King Charles III’s pink-red “bloodbath” portrait, a new painting of the Princess of Wales has been released. (We’ll go more into what Sargent meant by that quote later).
The painting was done by artist Hannah Uzor for Tatler Magazine — a fact some people got confused, thinking it was actually commissioned by the royal family.
I must admit, when I first saw the image in my phone newsfeed, it looked amateurish to me. But when I checked out the comments on Twitter/X, some of them seemed overly harsh:
@Kitizey:
LOL Poor Princess Kate LOL This is the biggest piece of crap portrait painting I have ever seen. #HannahUzor should be utterly embarrassed by this work she did
@seanbwparker
Kate in Tatler. If you're going to attempt portrait realism, I'd say this fails, since it looks nothing like Princess K. But there is a style called 'bad painting', in which the artist deliberately tries to get it wrong - so maybe a success after all?
Kate Middleton portrait enrages public: 'Is this a joke?': A new portrait of Kate Middleton is sparking discourse on the internet, with many believing the painting does not do the princess justice and looks nothing like her. http://dlvr.it/T7GGH2
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But is this fair? I mused that one thing the portrait had done was stir up debate and discussion. It also seems to take an irreverent tone; there is something severe in the princess’s manner; this is not glamourous but stoic, a la the folk art style of “American Gothic.”
The singular serious figure in the white dress and sash is unsmiling; she almost looks worried. Given her current health concerns and her grit to have continuously appeared razor-thin in her public appearances, this image invites us to look at Kate not with the celebrity worship of a Diana, but an understanding, almost pitying gaze.
Another thing it may be doing is being irreverent. Uzor is an African artist, and colonialism is being viewed these days via a critical eye and retroactive condemnation, so the piece may be reflecting that.
I also don’t know that the criticism of her artistic skills is fair. Tatler Magazine put out a video about her and her process, and the sketches she does for the piece look very realistic. This makes me think the earnest simplicity and sparseness of the likeness if intentional.
But the chorus of online voices seems to have decried the work as unflattering, if not childlike.
All the hullaballoo reminded me of the drama back in 2012 when 80-year old Cecilia Jimenez, who inadvertently ruined a 19th-century fresco of Jesus, “Ecce Homo,” in Spain. (Of course, “ruined” is subjective, but the thing does kinda look like a smeared monkey face).
Above: Ecce Homo before and after.
In fact, some people sometimes refer to Ecce Homo now as Ecce Mono (roughly Behold the Monkey, "mono" being Spanish for "monkey"). However, I was today years old when I learned that Ms. Jiminez said she actually had not finished the restoration, but left it to dry and went on holiday for two weeks, thinking she would finish when she returned. “When I came back, everybody in the world had heard about Ecce Homo. The way people reacted still hurts me, because I wasn’t finished with the restoration,” she said, according Wikipedia.
That the botched (or unfinished) restoration brought more attention to the fresco in the long run made me think not only of the Princess Kate painting, but of how one of the purposes of art is to get people thinking; to show a point of view they had not considered.
I had such a revelation about a year ago when I went with a friend to the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC., where I hadn’t been in years. As we sat on a bench in the bright polished stone atrium, my gaze wandered from the famous Calder mobiles gently turning above to an intriguing modern metal sculpture on the floor against the opposite wall. A bizarre royal family gazed back, on a kind of family throne. It invited a lot of contemplation. The king had steer-like horns and a tall scepter with a whimsical tip. What’s up with that? Why do the royal child and queen appear to have fish-like tails?
Above: Capricorn by Max Ernst, as it appears in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
I couldn’t stop looking over at it and wondering about it. It seemed to be whimsical and indicative of some primal truths at the same time. The Nation Gallery web site describes it well:
“Capricorn refers to the tenth sign of the zodiac, usually represented by a goat with a fish tail. Ernst divided Capricorn's attributes between two figures, the horned male and the mermaid. Based on Ernst's other sculptures, the two main figures can be identified as a generic king and queen seated on their thrones. He reportedly called Capricorn a family portrait, although Tanning [his wife] cast doubt on that.”
It goes on to dissect the elements and the implications and contemplations of the piece:
“A founding member of the Dada and surrealist movements, Ernst was always more interested in ambiguity and fantasy than in clarity and rationality. In Capricorn he pursues these modes through the use of surprising pairings and oppositions, both in process and imagery. These often produce humorous effects. One example is the king's scepter, a phallic symbol whose authority is mocked by the puzzled, puffy mask at its top, originally cast from an egg crate. (Tanning said that the scepter itself was made from milk containers, as perhaps was the king's similarly conical phallus). The king's power is further undercut by the fact that his queen is so much taller than he. Yet she is equally subject to derision: a fish or arrow appears to have penetrated her birdlike head. Her armless cello-shaped torso suggests the playability of her body, while her cantilevered tail stabilizes but also constrains her.”
Another thing that occurred to me about the queen figure is that the arrow-like object spearing through her head represents the pressures and onuses of maintaining a regal bearing.
And this brings us back around to Princess Kate and the look of strain on her face in the Tatler painting.
So what did John Singer Sargent mean by “something is funny with the mouth”? “Sargent’s comment is indicative of the power struggle, implicit or not, between the artist and the sitter as to how they really look and how they are to be depicted,” according to this blog on the Reagan Upshaw fine art site.
I interpret it to mean that the subject quibbles with the artist over certain details, such as the mouth, so they look “off” to the latter. Although portraits can be the most lucrative type of paintings for working artists, my friend refused to do any more. And I had seen some of her portraits, and they were just gorgeous.
But criticize though people may, one of the wonderful things about art is there are no real rights or wrongs; the meaning of each piece is ultimately up to each viewer.