Why Does the New Kate Middleton Portrait Look Nothing Like Her?

This week, Kensington Palace offered the first Kate Middleton health update since she announced her cancer diagnosis in March. And the news is basically that there’s no news. Following speculation that Catherine, the Princess of Wales, might soon resume public duties, a Kensington Palace spokesman told the BBC: “The princess is not expected to return to work until it’s cleared by her medical team.”

So it seems we won’t be seeing the princess anytime soon. But the public did get a new look at her — though it was a bit hard to tell. On Wednesday, Tatler magazine released its July cover, which features a portrait of the princess painted by British-Zambian artist Hannah Uzor.

Online commentators and a handful of actual art critics were quick to note that the portrait looks absolutely nothing like Kate. The Daily Telegraph’s chief art critic, Alastair Sooke, deemed it “egregiously, intolerably, jaw-hits-the-floor bad.” He elaborated:

I’ve spent the past hour or so – time, incidentally, that I will never get back – scrutinising Uzor’s “likeness”, and, still, I cannot divine any flicker of resemblance between it and the woman it’s supposed to depict. At first, my editor thought it was meant to represent Meghan, Duchess of Sussex; its subject’s smirk made me think, initially, of Anne Robinson fronting The Weakest Link. 

Has there been a flatter, more lifeless royal portrait in living memory? … Beneath a Lego-like helmet of unmodulated, monotonously brown “hair”, this Princess of Wales has as much charisma as a naff figurine atop a wedding cake. 

So what exactly is going on here? Here are some possible explanations.

The princess had nothing to do with this painting.

This is not an official portrait; it was not sanctioned by the palace, the princess did not sit for the painting, and the royals haven’t said anything about it publicly. Tatler said it commissioned the artwork to “honour the Princess of Wales for its third annual cover portrait.” (The previous portraits of Queen Elizabeth and King Charles, which were produced by other artists, looked more like their subjects.) The accompanying magazine piece explained that Uzor used Getty images of the princess for reference:

She tells me that her practice is driven by her interest in history, particularly diasporic culture and its manifestation in personal and public memory. The act of researching and observation is just as important to her in building a picture of the sitter as the research material she discovers. Each body of work is centred on a particular research focus, drawing from a variety of references, including archival images, historical paintings, family photographs and literature.

For this commission, she predicts that she will spend a lot more time preparing and researching than actually painting. There is a lot of material to cover – there are more than 189,000 pictures of the Princess of Wales in the Getty Images archive, she tells me. But she doesn’t seem daunted and intends to look at as many photos as she possibly can before basing the final work on a composite image.

The portrait was produced very quickly.

For unclear reasons, Tatler only gave Uzor three weeks to complete this portrait. Supposedly, she wasn’t bothered by the quick turnaround time.

“I work quickly,” she told the magazine. “Once I start painting, it will only take me two or three days.”

Still, this did not take years to produce, like many other royal portraits.

It’s not really supposed to look like Kate Middleton.

In a video posted to Instagram, Uzor said she aims to “capture the soul” of her subjects.

The artwork is titled “The Princess of Wales - A Portrait of Strength and Dignity,” and the Tatler piece emphasizes the artist’s efforts to capture Kate Middleton’s grace and courage. But the magazine piece includes a hint that Uzor may have been trying to convey something a bit more subversive about the royals:

The important thing for her in any portrait is to convey the layers of the subject’s personality – in this case, more specifically to capture the dichotomy between the public persona and the private. Uzor expresses huge admiration for the Princess of Wales: ‘She has really risen up to her role – she was born for this. She carries herself with such dignity, elegance and grace.’

Perhaps it’s intentional that the recognizable elements of the portrait are the clothing and the royal regalia, not the woman wearing them. We’re supposed to see the royals as living symbols of the British monarchy, not individuals with distinctive personalities. Even though Kate Middleton is one of the most photographed women in the world, we don’t really know her.

Weird royal portraits are hot right now.

This painting comes on the heels of the Photoshop scandal surrounding the Mother’s Day photo of Kate Middleton with her children and the release of this absolutely wild official portrait of King Charles.

Pleasant and realistic images of the royals are clearly not the trend right now. Just be happy the princess has all her fingers in the Uzor painting and doesn’t look like a 16th-century tyrant and sorcerer who’s come back to fight the Ghostbusters.