Very nice portrait. I have never seen that one before.
1955 portrait[edit]
The 1955 painting was commissioned by the City of London livery company, the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers. It was first displayed in 1955 and later loaned by the Fishmonger’s Company in 1958 and 1986 before the National Portrait Gallery’s 2012 exhibition. It is displayed at their livery hall, Fishmongers’ Hall, adjacent to London Bridge.[1]
It is a full-length portrait in tempera, oil and ink on paper on canvas. Wearing the robes of the Order of the Garter, Elizabeth stands in a pastoral landscape, inspired by a comment that she made to Annigoni of how much she liked to watch people and traffic from a window as a child. The National Portrait Gallery described the painting as showing Elizabeth “in a sylvan idyll yet outward looking and connected to her surroundings” and wrote that when first shown “it drew crowds said to be ten-deep with viewers fascinated by the portrait’s idealised yet penetrating character”.[1] It was first displayed at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition and was shown alongside a recent portrait of Elizabeth by Simon Elwes
The Times placed the portrait in the tradition of works that sacrificed “the reality of the monarch to the idea of the monarchy”, saying that Annigoni had “managed to capture some of her Majesty’s dignity and beauty. All he has failed to capture is her vitality”.[2] The paper compared the work unfavourably to Hans Holbein the Younger’s portrait of Jane Seymour, in which they felt “the complexity of the detail creates a coherent and deliberate abstract pattern, which has a life and meaning of its own”, transforming the sitter into a “more than human symbol”, whereas with Annigoni “...there is no such purpose and eloquence in the actual marks on the canvas; something has been subtracted from reality, but nothing has been added”.[2]
In 1972, The Times reported that the 1955 portrait was “dismissed by some critics as romanticized and ‘chocolate boxy’, but the public liked it. The Queen, too, is known to have done so”.[3]
In a 2013 article for The Daily Telegraph on the difficulties of painting Elizabeth, Harry Wallop wrote that the 1955 portrait has subsequently been “deemed to be the most successful of all” as it “...makes no attempt to unearth the inner life of the young woman. She stands aloof, regal but none the less a beautiful 28-year-old. It is undoubtedly a portrait of a queen.”[4]