I Painted the Viral King Charles Portrait. The Red Thing Frustrated Me

The day after my portrait’s public reveal with King Charles III—his first official painting since ascending to the throne—I saw that it was on the front cover of all the newspapers. That felt great, and those responses were all fairly positive.

Then it went mad online. It’s such an unusual thing for a painting to go so crazy around the world. But I soon became frustrated: The way the picture was reproduced tended to exaggerate the red color.

When an eight-foot picture is shrunk down to the size of a phone screen, the portrait is oversimplified, and this is the image most people see. A lot of people seemed to only be talking about the red. But the painting itself is a lot more subtle.

I’m on the board of the National Portrait Gallery in London and I was in a trustees meeting all afternoon so I couldn’t keep checking my phone. But I was occasionally getting messages from my daughters who were sending me the memes and conspiracy theories.

I thought this was perhaps a niche thing—until I saw these posts were getting millions of views.

It featured on Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show, Joe Rogan‘s podcast and Alex Jones‘s InfoWars, and chat shows everywhere—all these places you’d never expect a painted portrait to cut through to. It sparked so many conversations.

At that point, you feel like the painting no longer belongs to you.

Damien Hirst said to me many years ago that artists worry too much about avoiding bad reviews. What you want is both good and bad, because otherwise there’s no controversy for people to get excited about.

In our social media age, amid the TikTok phenomenon, I don’t underestimate the power of the 20 second video clip.

The video of the unveiling shows the picture under a theatrical black drape in the surroundings of the palace, and as the king pulls that off, he jumps out of the way because it’s massive and looking down from a height.

That tells a little ambiguous story. Whatever people were expecting of the painting—likely something more traditional—the reality probably wasn’t that, and the king’s reaction looked like surprise because he jumped back.

So, it invited everyone to interpret the portrait in the different ways they did. We obviously didn’t plan it like that, but in retrospect, I’m sure that’s partly why it cut through so far to the mainstream and the younger generation. It was a perfect little clip for sharing.

In truth, the king had seen the portrait when it was about 80 percent finished, so it wasn’t a complete surprise to him. I probably wouldn’t have been invited to do the public unveiling at the palace with him otherwise.

It’s an unusual picture, but I was trying to make it more contemporary and interesting, because royal portraits in recent decades have tended to be stiff and the faux-classical style has been a bit of a default.

But there’s no real reason for that. The few that diverge, like the one Lucian Freud did of Queen Elizabeth II, really stand out.

The king is really interested in painting, but I don’t think his mom was. To her it was an annoyance to sit for portraits, and it often showed in the pictures; she’s bearing it rather than enjoying it.

But Charles has a keen interest and is a big supporter of the arts. He set up the Royal Drawing School, which has become incredibly successful, and he paints himself.

I think the palace wouldn’t have asked me to do it unless he had some idea of my style already and knew what he was getting into.

I haven’t had any official feedback from the palace, but the king seemed very happy with the painting, and I have heard as much from others. The palace is probably more used than most to strange reactions, and so I think they took all the conspiracies in their stride.

In my mind as I painted were the stories about him, and how these portraits will stick around for hundreds of years, regardless of my own reputation. He has a historic role, and therefore I wanted to make the painting legible to future generations.

Two things stood out most of all. One is the fact he has a lifelong interest in nature and sustainability. He was a vocal advocate even when it was unfashionable and led to his ridicule, and now people realize he was ahead of his time.

The second is his connection to Wales. When I started this project, he was still the Prince of Wales, and we didn’t know exactly when he would become king.

The Worshipful Company of Drapers in London who commissioned the portrait gave me two instructions: One, on the scale of the image, and two, that he would be in military uniform—in this case, the bright red of the Welsh Guards—because they have a collection of war portraits in that size that they wanted the piece to sit in.

I swerved those sorts of official portraits in the past because I worried they would feel stiff and anachronistic; a kind of weird nod to the past when powerful people had to look powerful, and in some cases their survival depended on it.

That feels so out of step with our time. Part of the challenge was how to include the outfit and keep it legible enough to read its symbolism.

The Welsh Guards’ tunic is very bright red. I tested the red out. I even tried doing the background in a different color on a smaller version, and then of course what happens is your eye first goes to anything that’s red in the picture because it stands out.

By letting the red be everywhere, I hoped it would feel a bit other-worldly, and pose the question: What is royalty in this current age?

We don’t want to see them as distant figures because we know they’re humans with personality traits and quirks, and we know more things about them and what they’ve done than in past generations.

But we also want to buy into this sort of mysticism around them and what they represent because it’s interesting. I considered how to balance the two things compositionally.

Putting it in an unreal environment had two benefits. It conveyed that mysticism, I thought, and it subsumed the tunic so that the picture wasn’t all about the uniform.

The looseness of the background contrasted with the realism of the face and hands and certain other elements, to suggest this was a human being in the middle of a certain amount of madness.

The funny thing is, the painting was in the studio for quite a few months, and I showed it to people I trusted, but only two out of three or four dozen of them mentioned the color, and they both saw it as pink rather than red. It just shows how reproduction can distort things.

I had painted a portrait of the king’s father, Prince Philip, back in 2006 as a commission for a charity, and the two men are different in every way.

With Prince Philip, the process was very formal. It was a small portrait of him—the size was a way of getting around the default of big, stiff portraits—and he was surprised and amused that I was doing a little one, which was only just over a foot tall.

I went in hard on his face because he was this fascinating figure from another era. Fiercely intelligent and unbelievably competitive, it was never a relaxing moment around him. He was very much interested to know what you were doing, but also testing you all the time.

When he realized I was curious about other things, not just art—current affairs, science, and so on—he’s really started testing me, and would come in every time armed with questions which made it interesting, but also harder to concentrate on what I was doing.

He could be very funny, but he liked to trip you up.

Charles is the opposite. He’s very good at putting you at your ease and is a generous spirited person. He also uses humor and he’s funny but will also demonstrably laugh at your jokes. Even my terrible jokes.

There is barely any competitiveness, and that may come from having a dad who was like that. We’re often a contrast to our parents.

Most recently, I completed a portrait of Sir David Attenborough. He such an extraordinary and lovely man. I’d done a drawing of him about 10 years earlier for the Royal Collection because the queen used to commission them of her Order of Merit recipients.

I had like two quick sittings with Sir David for that and suspected he found it to be very dull. I was trying to work, but he was very curious and asking lots of questions because he’s into art and science and technology, a bit of everything.

We didn’t have any contact for several years and then this commission came along. I said: Are you sure? And I was told he specifically requested me. How could I say no to that?

He’s now 98, but he was 96 when he sat for the latest portrait. I was wondering if he’d still have the energy for it. But he was very up for doing it. He’s still energetic and making television programs. It was lovely. He was everything you’d expect him to be.

It turned out to be one of those magical experiences and a reminder of why this job is a privilege. It sounds trite to say, but it really is an amazing opportunity to spend time up close with people like that who you’d only ever see from a distance, if at all.

In the last few years, I’ve been off doing other things than portraits. But it has been fun doing them properly again. I tend not to have a wish list of potential subjects for portraits unless I’m doing a show. But I’m always interested in totemic figures.

At the moment, it would be very interesting to paint people like Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky or the climate activist Greta Thunberg. People who are not just extraordinary for what they’ve done, but also what they represent.

People keep asking me if I’d paint Donald Trump if he came back into power as president, and my instinct is to say no. But the reality is I probably wouldn’t be able to resist the chance to see someone like that in close quarters.

You never know, you might find you like them more than you expect—or quite possibly less. Painting is a great chance to see what someone’s like in person, not just based on their media image, which most of us rely on.

You’re always going to be tempted to paint those people who are making waves in the world. Where possible, you want to be doing it for good reasons and hopefully celebrate that, but it’s nice to have a bit of a mix of subjects.

My decision on taking on a project is mostly based on whether I have the freedom to do what I want with it, or if I feel I’m going to be leant on. You never want to feel you’re not being true to what you see or what you want to do.

If there’s an expectation to present a certain image or whitewash an individual, I walk away. But the fact that I’ve always done my own thing and the work is sometimes controversial—intentionally or otherwise—means people don’t expect to tell me how to do it.

It’s not necessarily whether someone’s good or bad. The most interesting subjects are often a mix of the two, and you can play with that.

The two dividing lines for me are: Is there a moral or ethical reason to not take something on? And will I have the freedom to be honest about who someone is?

Jonathan Yeo is one of the world’s leading figurative artists. He has painted and worked with iconic and celebrated figures around the world.

All views expressed are the author’s own.

As told to Shane Croucher.

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