THE GLOBAL
PROFILE
A Portrait Artist Fit for a King (but Not a
President)
Jonathan Yeo, about to unveil a major new painting of
King Charles III, also counts Hollywood royalty (Nicole Kidman) and prime
ministers (Tony Blair) as past subjects. But George W. Bush eluded him.
Mark
Landler
By Mark
Landler
Reporting
from London
Published
May 2, 2024
Updated May
15, 2024
Few famous
Britons, it seems, can resist the chance to be painted by Jonathan Yeo. David
Attenborough, the 97-year-old broadcasting legend, is among those who have
recently climbed the spiral stairs to his snug studio, hidden at the end of a
lane in West London, to pose for Mr. Yeo, one of Britain’s most recognized
portrait artists.
Yet when it
came to painting his latest portrait, of King Charles III, the artist had to go
to the subject.
Mr. Yeo
rented a truck to transport his 7.5-by-5.5-foot canvas to the king’s London
residence, Clarence House. There, he erected a platform so he could apply the
final brushstrokes to the strikingly contemporary portrait, which depicts a
uniformed Charles against an ethereal background.
The
painting, which will be unveiled at Buckingham Palace in mid-May, is the first
large-scale rendering of Charles since he became king. It will likely reconfirm
Mr. Yeo’s status as the go-to portraitist of his generation for Britain’s great
and good, as well as for actors, writers, businesspeople and celebrities from
around the world. His privately commissioned works can fetch around $500,000
each.
Painting
the king’s portrait also marks a return to normalcy for Mr. Yeo, 53, who
suffered a near-fatal heart attack last year that he attributes to the
lingering effects of cancer in his early 20s. The parallel with his subject is
not lost on him: Charles, 75, announced in February that he had been diagnosed
with cancer, just 18 months into his reign.
Mr. Yeo
said he did not learn of the king’s illness until after he had completed the
painting. If anything, his depiction is of a vigorous, commanding monarch. But
it gave Mr. Yeo deeper empathy for a man he got to know over four sittings,
beginning in June 2021, when Charles was still the Prince of Wales and
continuing after the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, and his
coronation last May.
“You see
physical changes in people, depending on how things are going,” Mr. Yeo said in
his studio, where he had decorously turned the as-yet-unveiled painting away
from the gaze of curious visitors. “Age and experience were suiting him,” he
said. “His demeanor definitely changed after he became king.”
The
portrait was commissioned by the Worshipful Company of Drapers, a medieval
guild of wool and cloth merchants that is now a philanthropy. It will hang in
Drapers’ Hall, the company’s baronial quarters in London’s financial district,
which has a gallery of monarchs from King George III to Queen Victoria. Mr.
Yeo’s Charles will add a contemporary jolt to that classical lineup.
“What Jonny
has succeeded in doing is combining the elusive quality of majesty with an
edginess,” said Philip Mould, a friend and art historian who has seen the
painting and called it “something of a unicorn.”
Fighting
Child Marriage in Malawi: At age 13, Memory Banda’s 11-year-old sister was
forced to wed a man in his 30s who had impregnated her. It was a moment of
awakening for the self-described “fierce child rights activist.”
A Portrait
Artist Fit for a King: Jonathan Yeo, about to unveil a major new painting of
King Charles III, also counts Hollywood royalty (Nicole Kidman) and prime
ministers (Tony Blair) as past subjects. But George W. Bush eluded him.
Inspiration
in Germany’s History: Jenny Erpenbeck became a writer when her childhood and
her country, the German Democratic Republic, disappeared, swallowed by the
materialist West.
Mr. Yeo is
no stranger to depicting royals. He painted Charles’ wife, Queen Camilla, who
he said was a delight, and his father, Prince Philip, who was less so. “He was
a bit of a caged tiger,” Mr. Yeo recalled. “I can’t imagine he was easy as a
father, but he was entertaining as a subject.”
Still, a
sitting monarch was a first for Mr. Yeo, whose subjects have included prime
ministers (Tony Blair and David Cameron), actors (Dennis Hopper and Nicole
Kidman), artists (Damien Hirst), moguls (Rupert Murdoch) and activists (Malala
Yousafzai).
Mr. Yeo
said there was an element of “futurology” to his work. Some of his subjects
have gone on to greater renown after he painted them; others have faded. A few,
like Kevin Spacey, who was tried and acquitted on charges of sexual misconduct,
have fallen into disrepute. The National Portrait Gallery in Washington
returned Mr. Yeo’s Spacey portrait, made when the actor played a ruthless
politician in the series “House of Cards.”
Gazing back
over his A-list subjects, Mr. Yeo has developed a few rules of thumb about his
art. Older faces are easier to capture than younger ones because they are more
lived in. The best portraits capture visual characteristics that remain
relevant even as the person ages. And the only bad subjects are boring ones.
“He didn’t
want me to pose, he just wanted me to talk,” said Giancarlo Esposito, the
American actor known for playing elegant villains in the crime classic
“Breaking Bad” and the recent Guy Ritchie TV series, “The Gentlemen.” As an
actor, Mr. Esposito said, he was skilled at projecting a persona, “but there
was no way to fool him.”
“It was an
opportunity to be Giancarlo, unmasked,” said Mr. Esposito, who said he last
posed for a portrait as a child at a county fair.
A
loose-limbed figure with a quick smile and stylish eyeglasses pushed far back
on his forehead, Mr. Yeo learned his appreciation for the charms and foibles of
public figures by being the son of one. His father, Tim Yeo, was a Conservative
member of Parliament and minister under Prime Minister John Major, whose career
was undone by professional and personal scandals.
At first,
the elder Mr. Yeo had little patience for his son’s artistic dreams. “My dad
definitely assumed I’d need to get a proper job,” he said, giving him no money
when he took a year off after high school to try to make it as a painter. Mr.
Yeo’s early efforts showed his lack of formal training, and “obviously, I
didn’t sell any pictures.”
Then, in
1993, at the end of his second year at university in Kent, he was struck by
Hodgkin’s disease. Mr. Yeo burrowed deeper into painting as a way of coping
with the disease. He got a break when a friend of his father — Trevor
Huddleston, an Anglican archbishop and anti-apartheid activist — commissioned
him for a portrait.
“He asked
me mostly out of pity,” Mr. Yeo recalled. “But it turned out spectacularly,
better than anyone expected.”
The
commissions began to flow, and Mr. Yeo became sought-after for his revealing
portraits of famous faces. In 2013, the National Portrait Gallery in London
mounted a midcareer exhibition of his work.
“He brought
the portrait back,” said Nick Jones, the founder of Soho House, a chain of
private members’ clubs, which worked with Mr. Yeo to hang paintings by him and
other artists on its walls. “Portraits were always such severe things,” Mr.
Jones said. “He was able to add layers and bring out the personality of the
people.”
It helps
that Mr. Yeo is well-connected, prolific and entrepreneurial. He is cleareyed
about the commercial side of his art. “No matter how you dress it up,” he said,
“to some extent, you’re in the luxury goods business.”
Successful
but creatively restless, Mr. Yeo began experimenting. When aides to President
George W. Bush contacted him to do a portrait and later dropped the project, he
decided to do it anyway, but as a collage of images cut out of pornographic
magazines.
The Bush
portrait went viral on the web, and Mr. Yeo created collages of other public
figures, including Hugh Hefner and Silvio Berlusconi. It was provocative but
time-consuming work — he bought stacks of skin magazines to assemble enough raw
material — and his supply dried up when, he said, “the iPad killed the
porn-magazine industry.”
Mr. Yeo
also became drawn to the uses of technology in art. He worked on design
projects at Apple. He painted the celebrity chef, Jamie Oliver, via FaceTime
during the pandemic. And he created an app that offers a virtual-reality tour
of his studio, a well-appointed space in an old workshop that once turned out
organs.
But on a
Sunday night in March 2023, Mr. Yeo’s busy life came to a terrifying halt. He
went into cardiac arrest — his heart stopping for more than two minutes. Mr.
Yeo said he believes the crisis was linked to his cancer treatment decades
earlier. While he did not see a bright light at the end of a tunnel, as others
with near-death experiences have described, he recalled a palpable sensation of
floating outside his body.
Mr. Yeo,
who is married and has two daughters, clung to life. After recuperating, he
found that his vocation as a painter — temporarily diverted by his detours into
technology and other pursuits — had been rekindled. Soon, he was immersed in
the portraits of Charles, Mr. Esposito and Mr. Attenborough.
“It
definitely makes you feel, ‘Let’s not mess around anymore,’” Mr. Yeo said.
“It’s like dodging a bullet.”
Mark
Landler is the London bureau chief of The Times, covering the United Kingdom,
as well as American foreign policy in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. He has
been a journalist for more than three decades. More about
Mark Landler
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