A large oil study for King Charles III’s polarizing first official portrait, unveiled a year after his coronation in May 2023, is now on view at Buckingham Palace, part of a major transformation of the Picture Gallery, one of the palace’s most popular semi-public spaces.
The gallery now showcases 120 paintings, nearly double the 63 that had previously been on view there. The revamp also involved replacing the coral velvet wall hangings with green silk damask and updating the gallery’s lighting.
While many visitors will surely come to see Old Master paintings from the Royal Collection, including canvases by Titian, Vermeer, and Caravaggio, some will be more curious to sneak a peek at a study for Jonathan Yeo’s controversial portrait of the King, now hanging in the Silk Tapestry Room, adjacent to the Picture Gallery. King Charles must not have been too put off by the nearly universal criticism of the portrait, as the Royal Collection recently accepted Yeo’s gift of the large study.
The study, like the seven-and-a half-foot-tall finished painting, shows King Charles head on, in a Welsh Guards uniform, with his hands clasped in front of his waist resting on a sword. The background of the study is more textured and brushy, showing swaths of pink, orange, and violet, rather than the more monochromatic blood-red tone of the painting. Yes, the study includes a butterfly hovering over his right shoulder.
Yeo has painted similarly styled portraits of public figures and celebrities ranging from Malala Yousafzai to Sir David Attenborough to Damien Hirst. The Drapers Company, a philanthropic organization that was once a trade association for wool and cloth merchants, commissioned the portrait of Charles when he was still the Prince of Wales; the first of four sittings was in 2021. The painting is on permanent view in Drapers’ Hall, a few miles of east of the study’s new home at Buckingham Palace.
