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| Testino’s portrait of William and Kate is a sickly sweet lie | Testino’s portrait of William and Kate is a sickly sweet lie |
| (about 2 hours later) | |
| No one can photograph a fake smile like Mario Testino can. I am not saying the huge cheesy grins on the faces of Kate and William in his christening portrait of the royal nuclear family are fake. After all, they have plenty to smile about – the free houses, the free money, the free adulation, the fact there’s no chance of their kids ever having to worry about student loans, tax credits or the minumum wage. All smiles all the way. But Testino, the world’s most horrible flatterer of wealth and status, makes every smile look phoney. He makes reality itself seem a glib and cynical charade. | No one can photograph a fake smile like Mario Testino can. I am not saying the huge cheesy grins on the faces of Kate and William in his christening portrait of the royal nuclear family are fake. After all, they have plenty to smile about – the free houses, the free money, the free adulation, the fact there’s no chance of their kids ever having to worry about student loans, tax credits or the minumum wage. All smiles all the way. But Testino, the world’s most horrible flatterer of wealth and status, makes every smile look phoney. He makes reality itself seem a glib and cynical charade. |
| Their faces lit up by hysterical joy, their hair wispy in the sun, their teeth shining like diamond walls of privilege, and their eyes betraying no signs of thought whatsoever, the Cambridges are robbed of true personality by Testino’s faux-honest glamour shot. Their children are so glossily celebrated that they look like fashion accessories, hired for the day. George, you can tell, is bored and hating this. He gives away the fact that, far from casually encountering Testino’s lens, the royalist antidotes to King Charles are in fact enduring the torture of a prolonged pose. | Their faces lit up by hysterical joy, their hair wispy in the sun, their teeth shining like diamond walls of privilege, and their eyes betraying no signs of thought whatsoever, the Cambridges are robbed of true personality by Testino’s faux-honest glamour shot. Their children are so glossily celebrated that they look like fashion accessories, hired for the day. George, you can tell, is bored and hating this. He gives away the fact that, far from casually encountering Testino’s lens, the royalist antidotes to King Charles are in fact enduring the torture of a prolonged pose. |
| They deserve better, and so do we. Testino is a bland and banal photographer whose images lack any shred of emotional depth. Time was that royalty employed actual artists, and royal portraits were more than PR exercises. If all royal families in history had been as sedulously flattered as ours is by Testino there would be no such works of art as Velazquez’s Las Meninas or Goya’s Family of Charles IV, in which royalty are revealed as mortal and fallible human beings. | They deserve better, and so do we. Testino is a bland and banal photographer whose images lack any shred of emotional depth. Time was that royalty employed actual artists, and royal portraits were more than PR exercises. If all royal families in history had been as sedulously flattered as ours is by Testino there would be no such works of art as Velazquez’s Las Meninas or Goya’s Family of Charles IV, in which royalty are revealed as mortal and fallible human beings. |
| Testino’s pictures of Princess Charlotte’s christening – which also include a more formal group portrait with the Queen, Duke of Edinburgh, Charles and Camilla and more – in fact consciously hark back to older traditions on royal portraiture. In the background to the large group picture, painted portraits on the wall remind us that Testino’s photographs are part of a long tradition of British royal portraiture that includes such masters as Gainsborough, Reynolds and Zoffany. | Testino’s pictures of Princess Charlotte’s christening – which also include a more formal group portrait with the Queen, Duke of Edinburgh, Charles and Camilla and more – in fact consciously hark back to older traditions on royal portraiture. In the background to the large group picture, painted portraits on the wall remind us that Testino’s photographs are part of a long tradition of British royal portraiture that includes such masters as Gainsborough, Reynolds and Zoffany. |
| It is the informality and naturalness of these 18th-century painters that Testino’s royal portraiture pretends to revive. The creamy rococo colours and flamboyant dynamic motions of his royals ape the swagger and gorgeousness of Gainsborough. But in the age of powdered wigs there was more to royal art than mere propaganda. | It is the informality and naturalness of these 18th-century painters that Testino’s royal portraiture pretends to revive. The creamy rococo colours and flamboyant dynamic motions of his royals ape the swagger and gorgeousness of Gainsborough. But in the age of powdered wigs there was more to royal art than mere propaganda. |
| Testino’s superficial insistence on the loveliness of the royal children and their parents makes a poor contrast with a painting by Zoffany in the royal collection that depicts the sons of George III as young children surrounded, as they play, by portraits of royalty that impose duties and discipline on them. Zoffany managed to show the burdens and stresses of royal childhood in a genuinely humanising way. That was 250 years ago. Today, royal portraiture is openly deceitful. Testino famously photographed Diana, but his pictures of her tell nothing about the anguish and the sorrow of her story. | Testino’s superficial insistence on the loveliness of the royal children and their parents makes a poor contrast with a painting by Zoffany in the royal collection that depicts the sons of George III as young children surrounded, as they play, by portraits of royalty that impose duties and discipline on them. Zoffany managed to show the burdens and stresses of royal childhood in a genuinely humanising way. That was 250 years ago. Today, royal portraiture is openly deceitful. Testino famously photographed Diana, but his pictures of her tell nothing about the anguish and the sorrow of her story. |
| Children are not jewels. They are forces of nature. Where’s the reality of childhood in these plastic fantastic visual lies executed by a master of fake truth? Why on earth do the royal family need to put out such sickening PR nonsense? It is no way to start a childhood, presented on a platter to the world by a three-star chef of sickly sweet pictorial cuisine. | Children are not jewels. They are forces of nature. Where’s the reality of childhood in these plastic fantastic visual lies executed by a master of fake truth? Why on earth do the royal family need to put out such sickening PR nonsense? It is no way to start a childhood, presented on a platter to the world by a three-star chef of sickly sweet pictorial cuisine. |
| The Cambridges have become too valuable to royal publicity to be allowed to be real. They are turning into living lies – the impossibly perfect people with their impossibly perfect children. Please, let them be human. From the widely reviled National Portrait Gallery painting of the Duchess of Cambridge to Testino’s glitz, their image is becoming so banal in its perfections that soon the picture must crack. No one really looks like this, no life is so unblemished. Let’s have some honest royal art instead of waiting to expose the pain that was airbrushed out. Again. | The Cambridges have become too valuable to royal publicity to be allowed to be real. They are turning into living lies – the impossibly perfect people with their impossibly perfect children. Please, let them be human. From the widely reviled National Portrait Gallery painting of the Duchess of Cambridge to Testino’s glitz, their image is becoming so banal in its perfections that soon the picture must crack. No one really looks like this, no life is so unblemished. Let’s have some honest royal art instead of waiting to expose the pain that was airbrushed out. Again. |