It seems few famous Brits can resist the chance to be painted by Jonathan Yeo. David Attenborough, the 97-year-old broadcasting legend, was among those who recently climbed the spiral stairs to his cozy studio, hidden at the end of a west London lane, to pose for M . Yeo, one of Britain’s most recognized personalities. portrait painters.
However, when it came to painting his last portrait, that of King Charles III, the artist had to go to the subject.
Mr Yeo hired a truck to transport his 7.5ft by 5.5ft canvas to the king’s London residence, Clarence House. There he erected a platform to be able to apply the final brushstrokes to this 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 depiction of Charles since he became king. It will likely confirm Mr Yeo’s status as his generation’s go-to portraitist for Britain’s greats, as well as actors, writers, businessmen and celebrities 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 does not escape him: Charles, 75, announced in February that he had been diagnosed with cancerjust 18 months into his reign.
Mr Yeo said he only learned of the king’s illness after completing the painting. On the contrary, his representation is that of a vigorous and authoritarian monarch. But it gave Mr Yeo a deeper empathy for a man he knew over four sessions, starting in June 2021, when Charles was still Prince of Wales and continuing after the death of his motherQueen Elizabeth II and his coronation last May.
“You see physical changes in people, depending on how things happen,” Mr. Yeo said in his studio, where he had conveniently turned the still-unveiled painting away from curious visitors. “The age and experience suited him,” he said. “His behavior 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 houses a gallery of monarchs from King George III to Queen Victoria. Mr. Yeo’s Charles will add a contemporary touch to this classic lineup.
“What Jonny managed to do was combine the elusive quality of majesty with a certain nervousness,” said Philip Mould, a friend and art historian who saw the painting and called it “something unicorn”.
Mr Yeo is no stranger to portraying the royal family. He painted Charles’s wife, Queen Camilla, who he said was a delight, and his father, Prince Philip, who was less so. “He was a bit of a tiger in a cage,” Mr. Yeo recalls. “I can’t imagine he was easy as a father, but he was entertaining as a subject.”
Yet a sitting monarch was a first for Mr Yeo, whose subjects included prime ministers (Tony Blair and David Cameron), actors (Dennis Hopper and Nicole Kidman), artists (Damien Hirst), tycoons (Rupert Murdoch) and activists (Malala Yousafzaï).
Mr Yeo said there was an element of “futurology” at his work. Some of his subjects became better known after he painted them; others have disappeared. A few, like Kevin Spacey, who was tried and acquitted accused of sexual misconduct, have fallen into disrepute. The National Portrait Gallery in Washington has restored Spacey’s portrait of Mr. Yeo, made when the actor played a ruthless politician in the series “House of Cards.”
Thinking back on his signature subjects, Mr. Yeo developed some 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 topics are the boring ones.
“He didn’t want me to pose, he just wanted me to talk,” said Giancarlo Esposito, the American actor known for playing stylish villains in the crime classic “Breaking Bad” and the recent TV series Guy Ritchie, “The Gentlemen.” ” As an actor, Mr. Esposito said, he was good at projecting a character, “but there was no way to fool it.”
“It was an opportunity to be Giancarlo, unmasked,” said Mr. Esposito, who said he last posed for a portrait as a child at a carnival.
A loose-limbed figure with a quick smile and stylish glasses pushed far back on his forehead, Mr. Yeo learned to appreciate the charms and foibles of public figures from being the son of one. His father, Tim Yeo, was a Conservative MP and minister under Prime Minister John Major, whose career was destroyed by professional problems and personal scandals.
At first, the elder Mr. Yeo had little patience for his son’s artistic dreams. “My dad really thought I would need to get a good job,” he said, giving her no money as he took a gap year after high school to try to become a painter. Mr Yeo’s early efforts showed his lack of formal training and “obviously I didn’t sell any photos”.
Then, in 1993, at the end of his second year at university in Kent, he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease. Mr. Yeo immersed himself deeper into painting to cope with illness. He got his chance when a friend of his father – Trevor Huddleston, an Anglican archbishop and anti-apartheid campaigner – commissioned a portrait of him.
“He asked me mainly out of pity,” Mr. Yeo recalled. “But it turned out spectacular, better than expected.”
Orders began to flood in, and Mr. Yeo became sought after for his revealing portraits of famous faces. In 2013, the National Portrait Gallery in London held a mid-career exhibition of his work.
“He brought back portraiture,” said Nick Jones, the founder of Soho House, a chain of private clubs, who worked with Mr. Yeo to hang paintings by him and other artists on its walls. “Portraits have always been very severe things,” Mr. Jones said. “He knew how to add layers and bring out people’s personalities.”
It helps that Mr Yeo is well-connected, prolific and entrepreneurial. He is lucid about the commercial side of his art. “No matter how you dress it,” he said, “to some extent you are in the luxury goods business.”
Successful but creative, Mr. Yeo began experimenting. When President George W. Bush’s aides contacted him about doing a portrait and then abandoned the project, he decided to do it anyway, but as a collage of images cut out from pornographic magazines.
Bush’s 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 gather enough raw material – and his reserves dried up when, he says, “the iPad killed the magazine industry.” pornographic”.
Mr. Yeo also became attracted to the uses of technology in art. He worked on design projects at Apple. He painted 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 a former workshop that once produced organs.
But one Sunday evening in March 2023, Mr Yeo’s busy life came to a terrifying halt. He went into cardiac arrest – his heart stopped for more than two minutes. Mr Yeo said he believed the crisis was linked to his cancer treatment decades earlier. Although he did not see a bright light at the end of a tunnel, as others with near-death experiences have described, he remembers a palpable sensation of floating outside his body. .
Mr Yeo, married with two daughters, clung to life. After recovering, he found that his vocation as a painter – temporarily sidetracked by his detours into technology and other pursuits – had been rekindled. Soon he was immersed in portraits of Charles, Mr. Esposito and Mr. Attenborough.
“It definitely gives you the feeling, ‘Let’s not mess around anymore,’” Mr. Yeo said. “It’s like dodging a bullet.”
