Stop and Look – Queen Elizabeth II by Pietro Annigoni

In the first three-quarters of the 20th century Modernism rather sidelined portraiture as an art form. It was rarely concerned with the depiction of individuals whose personalities spoke for themselves: it was more interested in aesthetics and ideas: the way a work of art is constructed, the way an artist can impose a personal vision or style on his or her experience.

All well and good, and some outright Modernists produced striking and often impressive images, but the sitter of a portrait was usually less important than the theory governing the presentation, or the personality of the artist him — or herself.   

Nevertheless, the grand tradition of celebrating individuals for their achievements, for their unique identity as revealed in their physical appearance, has persisted. In this series, we have seen De Laszlo’s unnerving portrait of Cardinal Rampolla which would not have been more revealing as the image of a personality if it had exemplified the theories of Cubism or Surrealism. To commemorate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee I’ve chosen this week a portrait of her that could hardly be less “Modernist”. 

If I’d wanted to celebrate Modernism in this context I might have selected Lucian Freud’s very small head of the Queen crammed, crown and all, into a mere 9 1/2 x 6 inches. But what that image most surely is not, despite the crown, is a celebratory portrait of the monarch, on the scale that such portraits are normally expected to be. The Fishmongers’ picture, by contrast, is both a likeness and a celebration. 

There are a large number of worthy portraits of the Queen by painters trying to square the circle: to create the recognizable likeness of a real historical individual that is at the same time dignified and truly royal, embodying the meaning of the monarchy as well as the person. In whom it is embodied. They are, alas, far from consistently excellent, though many find fresh things to say on what is, obviously, very well-explored ground. 

Most of these works are by British artists. The first thing to say about our picture is that it isn’t. More significant still, it’s by an Italian who makes considerable capital of his Italianness. Pietro Annigoni’s work is familiar all over Italy: it was he who produced the paintings that adorn the completely rebuilt monastery at Montecassino, St Benedict’s original Medieval foundation, destroyed by Allied bombing during the Anzio landings in 1944. He painted other religious subjects, altarpieces like his striking depiction of St Joseph with the child Christ in his carpenter’s shop, in the church of S. Lorenzo in Florence. But his main employment was portraiture and it was as a “society” portraitist that he was commissioned by the Fishmongers. Or was it really as a religious artist that they chose him?  

The portrait he produced of the young Queen two years after her coronation flies in the face of all the other likenesses of her that were produced at that time: it avoids the grandiose architecture that is the usual setting for such a portrait, nor the ermine, crown and sceptre of her coronation robes. Nor is she shown full-length. She is an immensely dignified and very beautiful young woman, in the dark blue and white satin of the robes of the Order of the Garter, standing erect and serene against a clear blue sky in a sparsely indicated landscape setting. 

It’s not an archetypal “English” landscape either: the few trees aren’t heavy with foliage, and the distant view is indeed distant, with no comfortably picturesque hills and valleys. Very subtly and obliquely, it seems to refer to the clear-skied landscapes we find in the backgrounds of early Renaissance depictions of the Virgin Mary. This, combined with the refined draughtsmanship of the head and the smooth, even paint surface, seems to make a deliberate claim to place the picture in the company of those universally recognised masterpieces of 15th century Italy, the Italy of Botticelli, the youthful Raphael and the Medici princes of Florence. But the great English masters — Gainsborough, Reynolds, Lawrence — are not even hinted at. 

I find this much more shocking than the fact that, as some people have complained, Annigoni’s is not a “modern” picture at all. He was not “modern” either temperamentally or stylistically, and obviously, the Fishmongers didn’t want “modern” in their celebration of the Queen. They chose him because he adhered to the old-fashioned virtues of fine technique and clear presentation of the subject. The personality he presents could hardly be more regal, formal and grand; but in the simplicity and clarity of the artist’s presentation of her, she possesses those qualities in ways that don’t belong to our more painterly native style. Despite the grandeur, this is a shockingly simple, unpretentious picture. 

And as the decades have rolled by, the picture has become more and more appropriate to its subject. As the Queen becomes increasingly “iconic”, an icon is indeed what Annigoni has made her.  

So that is also my “Word Watch” subject for the week. There’s hardly a more overused — and thoroughly misused — word at the moment than “iconic”: it doesn’t mean “popular” or “celebrated” so much as “representative”, “conventional” or “typical”, referring to the repetitive nature of religious images. I’ve just noticed a news item referring to the Queen’s handbag as “iconic”, which is surely going too far, putting it in the same category as Margaret Thatcher’s. Annigoni’s delicate reference to the saints of fifteenth-century Italy justifies me, I think, in using the word to refer to our Queen as he painted her, freshly committed to her daunting role, in her golden youth.

Andrew Wilton was the first Curator of the Clore Gallery for the Turner Collection at Tate Britain and is the author of many works on the artist.