His dark tailor-made suit fits as perfectly as the handkerchief, her green dress from “The Vampire’s Wife” brand shimmers like silk. The couple’s eyes are slightly distracted, as if a champagne whisk has fallen just beyond the gold frame in which they are mounted: This is what it looks like, the first official double portrait of Prince William and his wife Kate, created by British painter Jamie Coreth .
The National Portrait Gallery in London, which houses portraits of important and prominent people from Britain’s past and present, is currently closed. Otherwise this work would doubtless have been unveiled there. It is now on display at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. That fits, after all, they are both the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. The work is intended as a “gift from the people of Cambridgeshire”, originally suggested and funded by the foundation of entrepreneur Sir Michael Marshall, who died in 2019.
According to the artist, he wanted the two to be “both relaxed and approachable as well as elegant and dignified”. Jamie Coreth studied archaeology, so perhaps for the William Kate full-length portrait he unearthed the smooth painting style of John Singer Sargent, an American master technician without depth who was the favorite portraitist of the international haute volée at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. It was a style that anticipated the soft-focus aloofness of 1950s fashion photography. Coreth has remained true to this aesthetic lack of tension.
Why not order directly from China?
The portrait is intended to evoke “a sense of balance between her public and private life,” says the painter. The fact that Kate, as it were, snuggles up to the self-confidently standing William, also somehow corresponds to the marital role understanding of the 19th century.
However, since the work in its execution ultimately does not come close to the quality of a John Singer Sargent, from a technical point of view it primarily evokes an association with those portraits that can be ordered online in China: you upload a photo and an artist painter in a suburb of Shenzhen turns it into a representative painting in any desired format. For the next royal portrait commission, one could perhaps fall back on this solution right away in order to strengthen economic relations with China and save money.