Tag Archives: Royalty

May 2, 2023

A Coronation Primer

By daseger

Time to put some of my day job perspectives out there: it’s not every day/year/decade/half-century that we get to see a British coronation! I’m kind of excited; I even dusted off some of my old grad school books about medieval monarchy and royal iconography last weekend. Over my career, I’ve taught about the interrelationships between spiritual and secular authorities pretty constantly in medieval and early modern courses, but I seldom have time to delve into all the expressions of these alliances and conflicts, and coronations are case studies in both symbolism and projection: in the distant past, the more recent past, and judging from all of the official imagery leading us to the coronation of King Charles III, even today.

Official Coronation “paper”: invitation by heraldic artist Andrew Jamieson, emblem by Sir Jony Ive KBE and his creative coalition LoveFrom, one of four thematic stamps produced from wood engravings produced by Andrew Davidson for Atelier Works.

I’ve always thought of King Charles III as a traditional man, primarily because of his preference for classical architecture, I think. The images above definitely reinforce this characterization for me, but they also reveal his interests in the natural world and diverse, hopefully harmonious communities. I love the tradition-embracing change aesthetic of these images, and I think the Coronation will have a similar tone. Coronations are absolutely traditional, but they are also flexible ceremonies which can embrace variant themes according to individual preferences: they evolved over time and reflect their historical contexts. Early medieval coronations seem to represent order, legitimacy, and the evolving sacred nature of kingship; later medieval coronations still embrace those themes but also a more independent divine authority of kings who were claiming unmediated mandates from God rather than through the Pope. This continues into the seventeenth century, but there were also increasing references to “the people” in both feudal fashion and a (slightly) more egalitarian manner. There were lots of changes in the 18th and 19th centuries: to accomodate and highlight the constitutional role of the monarchy and British and Imperial sovereignty. After the long reign of Queen Victoria, it was time for a “refresh,” but tradition sill reigned: this seems very similar to what we are experiencing now. Of course we enter the era of the intensifying power of both public opinion and public relations in the twentieth century, and the coronations of both Kings Edward VII in 1902 and George V in 1911 really reflect these developments. We get these great souvenir books (as well as a flood of material souvenirs) in the twentieth century too: one of my favorites, published by the Illustrated London News for the coronation of Edward III, features wonderful (though quite imaginary) images of previous coronations with Edwards past presented in color and gilt.

Images from The Coronation of King Edward VII, 1902, published by the Illustrated London News (cover against some great Queen Victoria wallpaper from the Victoria & Albert Museum.)

King Edward I, the Confessor’s role in coronation history derives principally from his commissioning of the Coronation Chair on which King Charles will be crowned, as well as the Crown itself, but I’m not sure that all of the other Edwardian coronations are singular, with the exception of that of King Edward II, in which he swore “to observe the future laws made by the community of the realm.” Those last three words constitute a very powerful phrase, and precedent. Most British historians assert that the first ceremonial coronation, or perhaps that which was recorded in detail, was that of Edgar “the Peaceful” at Bath Abbey in 973. This was orchestrated by the great Saint Dunstan and featured both an early version of the contractual oath and a coronation banquet (feasting is always associated with coronations). William the Conqueror was the first monarch to be crowned at Westminster Abbey, Tudor coronations featured a notable expansion of pomp and symbolism (particularly Arthurian symbolism) reflecting concerns of legitimacy after the Wars of the Roses and the new sovereignty over the English Church established by King Henry VIII, and Stuart coronations were more elaborate (and longer) still, particularly those after the Civil War. King Charles II’s coronation featured a mile-and-a-half-long procession and reconstituted regalia, as Oliver Cromwell had destroyed what he saw as profane objects. In the 18th century, King George I’s coronation oath replaced “Kingdom of England” with “Kingdom of Great Britain” after the Union with Scotland, and King George IV’s oath replaced “Great Britain” with “United Kingdom” in 1821. At the end of that decade King William IV seems to have desired to dispense with all the pomp and circumstance, bud did ride to Westminster Abbey in the 1762 Gold State Coach, establishing a “tradition” which continued thereafter. Queen Victoria “restored” everything in her coronation in 1838, which lasted for five hours and featured lots of mistakes, mandating rehearsals for the future.

Edgar the Peaceful among the Saints, c. 1050; Thomas More’s poem upon the occasion of the Coronation of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon, 1509; Depictions of Queen Victoria’s Coronation looking back, 1897, Illustrated London News, all British Library.

There is room for variation and innovation in the order and elements of the Coronation ceremony as well as its overall presentation: to me, it seems to have evolved from a Christian and feudal ceremony to a secular and constitutional one, but there’s still quite a bit of religious overtone to it obviously, and more majesty than anything else. King Charles will maintain the four essential elements of every twentieth-century coronation: 1) the Recognition, derived from the recognition of the monarch observed by the Witenagemot, the Anglo-Saxon predecessor of Parliament; 2) the Oath, representing the contract between the monarch and the people; 3) the Annoiting (or Unction), representing the monarch’s consecration by the Church of England; and 4) the Homage: a feudal survival in which the “Lords Spiritual and Temporal” pledge fealty to the monarch. The King is crowned between the Annoiting (with the Restoration-reconstituted St. Edward’s Crown) and the Homage, and this is supposed to happen around noon, British time of course. But in addition to all this “tradition,” there will be some key changes, some very detailed, others rather momentous. King Charles and Queen Camilla will ride to the Abbey in Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee Coach, rather than the golden Georgian coach. A new “Greeting of the King,” which will precede the Recognition, in which two chorus boys will welcome the King (and the Queen) to the Abbey. The Annoiting of a monarch is a sacred ritual, not be broadcast in any way, so iconographer Aidan Hart and the Royal School of Needlework have produced a privacy screen featuring a tree design representing the 56 Commonwealth countries, but there is a new annointing oil recipe! The Homage will be much shorter than in coronations past, as the 1999 House of Lords Act curtailed the peerage (but not short enough for most Britons, I think). But most important of all, the Coronation service will feature prominent roles for Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist and Jewish leaders, as well as prayers and readings in other British languages (Welsh and Scottish and Irish Gaelic), and a woman will present the Swords of State and Offering for the very first time.

From Old England: A Pictorial Museum of Regal, Ecclesiastical, Municipal, Baronial, and Popular Antiquities, ed. by C. Knight (1860).

3 Comments | tags: Big Events, British History, British Library, Commemoration, Coronations, England, Great Britain, Iconography, King Charles III, Memorabilia, Monarchs, News, Rituals, Royalty, United Kingdom | posted in Culture, History

July 17, 2019

Now I feel even worse for the Romanovs

By daseger

I’ve had this dreadful summer chest cold over the last week or so; it’s taking forever to go away. I have tried to go about business as usual, but it persists, so on Monday I just laid in bed all day determined to vanquish it with as much liquids, honey, throat lozenges, and rest as possible. I was too miserable to read, so television was the only option. I turned on my reliable Turner Classic Movies only to find that forgettable 1930s caper movies were the order of the day, and so surfed around on Netflix for a bit and chose one of their new offerings called The Last Czars, and once it was on, streaming and streaming, I found that I could not look away, simply because it was so awful. I was aghast; I remain aghast. If this is where history dramatizations are going, it’s over for us a civilization. Let me just start with one illustration of the series’ sloppiness: a screenshot supposedly representing “Moscow in 1905” with Lenin’s Mausoleum (which assumed its present form around 1930) clearly visible! Everything is fluid, right; Russian Empire, Soviet Union, what’s the difference?

Last Czars screenshot

I’m certainly not the first to point this error out: the series has received scathing reviews both in the West and in Russia (this particularly essay is great). And I’m also no Russian history expert, but even I noticed all sorts of little “discrepancies” and much chronological confusion: without sufficient context, the Russo-Japanese War seems to morph right into the First World War. But these are not the primary sins of The Last Czars (why “czars” and not “tsars”; and why plural?): its most glaring fault is its format, a weird, even bizarre, hybrid of talking-head commentary and very intimate drama. One minute we’re hearing that the Nicholas and Alexandra had a rare royal loving relationship and the next minute we’re seeing them rolling around on the bed and the floor with very little left to our imaginations. These transitions are far from seamless: when it first happened I thought (in my cold-medicine-induced haze) that I had somehow changed the channel. There’s nothing particularly new about the docudrama, but the contrast between the drama and the commentary is heightened to an unwatchable degree by the intense focus on the personal in the scripted scenes of The Last Czars, so that both parts of the production do not add up to something whole or greater, but something far less. It is neither feast nor fowl.

Last Czars ss 2

It’s all so personal and so sexual: perish the thought that an idea, a consideration, or even a well-articulated sentiment existed in the realm of the Romanovs. Even before the inevitable arrival of Rasputin there is gratuitous sex and once he is in the picture there is of course more, much more. No doubt the producers of The Last Czars have rationalized the inclusion of so much sex as a way to uncover their subjects’ humanity but instead they have robbed them of their dignity, particularly the Tsar and Tsarina, and their daughter Maria, often described as innocently flirtatious but ready to go all the way with a Bolshevik guard in the series’ last episode. Obviously there’s nothing fresh or new about the focus on Rasputin or the continuous thread of the Anastasia impostor, which serves no purpose that I could see. The sole redeeming features I could find in this soulless series are the contemporary film clips and anti-Rasputin ephemera (though I have since learned that the latter date from after the mad monk’s death in 1916) but even they add to the confusion of the presentation. After watching as much of The Last Czars as I could take, I felt worse, both for myself and for the Romanovs, who died very early on this very day one hundred and one years ago.

Last Czar Last Picture The last photograph of the last Tsar, Nicholas II, and his family, at the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, where they were executed in the early hours of July 17, 1918.

12 Comments | tags: Anniversaries, Popular Culture, Romanovs, Royalty, Russia, Television | posted in Culture, History

February 20, 2019

Really Rubbish Royal Relics

By daseger

Sometimes, no all the time, I think that I’m devoting too much time to social media, but occasionally you find yourself in the middle of some very interesting exchanges. The other day a really funny thread about the sheer dreadfulness of English delftware coronation plates from the late Stuart era unravelled on Twitter, and I couldn’t help but jump in, as I had just seen this William & Mary plate in a Sotheby’s auction and I needed some context and “conversation”!

William and Mary Sotheby's 2

Oh no, poor William, and even poorer Mary, with so much exposed. Neither looks very happy–or dignified. These crude plates started to appear with the Restoration, when people apparently sought them as symbols of a revived and “colorful” monarchy after years of dour Cromwellian rule. Many of the images of King Charles II in his coronation robes appear naive but charming, but by the time his niece and nephew were crowned, it looks like aesthetic standards have deteriorated quite a bit—or perhaps the potteries could not keep up with demand. When we look at these items now, they look comical, rather than reverential. The curatorial contributors to our Twitter exchange labeled these plates “Really Rubbish 17th-century Royal Memorabilia” so I am following suit, but I can’t help but also notice a distinct differentiation of display by gender in these plates: after Queen Mary’s untimely death (from smallpox, at the age of 32 in 1694), King William is depicted in a more stately fashion alone, and after he is succeeded by (poor) Queen Anne, we once again see the return of extensive decolletage. Why such excessive immodesty?

Coronation Plate Collage

William and Mary Charger BM

William and Mary Winterthur

editrs365881_603191-lpr_0

Queen Anne V and A

Delftware Queen Anne Ashmolean

William and Mary Coronation plates, c. 1690-94 from (clockwise): Samuel Herrup Antiques; Sotheby’s; and the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum; Queen Mary does come off a bit better (or at least more covered up) in SOME of the coronation plates in which she and William are standing, but it varies, as these two examples from the British Museum and Winterthur illustrate (and occasionally he is handing her the orb, which is good). It’s hard to make Queen Anne look good, but I don’t understand why she has to display such extravagant cleavage in these delftware plates from the Victoria and Albert collections and the Ashmolean Museum of Oxford University.

7 Comments | tags: Antiques and Collectibles, Auctions, Decorative Arts, Gender, Memorabilia, Pottery, Royalty, Seventeenth Century, Stuarts | posted in Design, History

February 16, 2018

Topsy-Turvy

By daseger

I find myself these days full of feelings of dissent and resistance but looking for more whimsical ways to express the same, as you can’t be strident all the time. It’s boring, and exhausting. So a flashing reference caught my attention, to a dinner party in Baltimore in February of 1777 attended by two of the most strident people in history: John and Samuel Adams of Massachusetts. The next day, John noted in his diary [II, 434]: Last evening I supped with my friends, Dr. Rush and Mr. Sargeant, at Mrs. Page’s, over the bridge. The two Colonel Lees, Dr. Wisherspoon, Mr. Adams, Mr. Gerry, Dr. Brownson, made the company. They have a fashion, in this town, of reversing the picture of King George III in such families as have it. One of these topsy-turvy kings was hung up in the room where we supped, and under it were written these lines, by Mr. Throop, as we are told: Behold the man, who had it in his power/ To make a kingdom tremble and adore, Intoxicate with folly. See his head Placed where the meanest of his subjects tread. Like Lucier, the giddy tyrant fell; He lifts his heal to Heaven, but points his head to Hell.

King George III by Nathaniel Dance-Holland, National Trust, Uppark

Well I like this “fashion”, and can certainly think of one or two people I’d like to turn upside down at the moment. I’m sure we all can. Apologies to my British friends: I couldn’t find an image of a Baltimore dining room with a topsy-turvy portrait of King George, so I simply turned him upside down myself. But we must note that like so many of their revolutionary sensibilities, the new Americans were simply following a British example: in this case the “world turned upside down” sentiments of the English Revolution in the previous century. The leader of that revolution, Oliver Cromwell, was himself turned upside down when an Indian monarchist of the Victorian era purchased his portrait and displayed it topsy-turvy in a delayed protest of the regicide: the Inverness Museum and Art Gallery followed suit when it acquired the portrait, and Tate Britain when it exhibited it. Another topsy-turvy ruler is Philip V of Spain, whose portrait is traditionally upended in the Almodí Museum in Xàtiva, in retribution for the burning of the city at the close of the War of the Spanish Succession.

Robert Walker (in the style of), Inverness Museum and Art Gallery

The first Bourbon King of Spain, Philip V.

Later in the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, the upside-down, topsy-turvy motif was mostly used in a satirical or critical way, the point having been established: “it is monstrous that the feet should direct the head” (in the words of my favorite queen, Elizabeth I, to make up for turning George III upside down) or something’s not right here. There was also a two-sides-of-the-same-coin message in some topsy-turvy images, as well as a general sense of we’re being tossed about/PLAYED. That’s how I feel.

topsy turvy collage

TOpsy Turvy Economy 1979 Jean-Michel Folon Smithsonian NPG Topsy-turvy “Talons” Kaiser Wilhelm I and Emperor Napoleon III, 1878, Victoria & Albert Museum; the Topsy-turvy Economy, 1978, Jean Michel Folon, Smithsonian/National Portrait Gallery.

9 Comments | tags: Art, Bad Men, George III, Illustrations, John Adams, Oliver Cromwell, Peabody Essex Museum, Phillips Library, Revolutionary War, Royalty, Smithsonian, Victoria & Albert Museum | posted in Art, Culture, History

March 29, 2016

Little British Books

By daseger

I have a particular predilection for small decorative books published in collectible series, which British publishers are particularly good at producing. I have posted about two of my favorite series before, Britain in Pictures and King Penguins, and on this recent trip I encountered some more! The very traditional and well-stocked Daunt Books, which in addition to selling books has its own imprint, had several series on display in their main store on Marylebone High Street in London, and Waterstones (now managed by James Daunt) had a beautiful display of the new Penguin Monarchs series AND two big bookcases full of classic Penguins. The British love their Penguins, and who can blame them?

Daunt Books London

Daunt Books

Daunt Books Display 2

Candlewick Press Collage

Daunt Books Display

All sorts of books at Daunt including pamphlets: the Candlewick Press “Poetry Pamphlets” are marketed with the pitch phrase “instead of a card”; the “Little Black Classics” were issued in a series of 80 volumes last year to commemorate Penguin’s 80th anniversary.

Penguins Orange

Penguins Blue

Penguin Monarchs

Penguin Monarch Charles II.

Over at Waterstones on Gower Street, there were vintage paperback Penguins in orange and blue, and the new Penguins monarchs series, “ short, fresh, expert accounts of England’s rulers in a collectible format” with commissioned covers. I want all 45 of them (44 kings and queens + Oliver Cromwell, of course).

5 Comments | tags: books, illustration, London, Penguins, Royalty, Shopping | posted in Design, Travel

September 4, 2014

Paper Queens

By daseger

It’s back-to-school time and that mean I’m spending money: on myself. When I was a little girl, my elegant grandmother (still quite immaculately dressed at 101) would drive up from Massachusetts to Maine with a trunkful of dresses in late August or early September, and I would immediately run up to my room with all my loot, change into these beautiful frocks, and “treat” everyone to a fashion show. Many years later, I still think I deserve a back-to-school shopping spree every September, even though I’m a professor rather than a student (and I have to pay for it myself). I remain the clotheshorse/monster that my grandmother created, but this year I haven’t been spending much money on clothes: instead I seem strangely drawn to stationery. In the past week I’ve purchased calendars, planners, notecards, mousepads and other pads, and lots and lots of folders. I’m concerned that this is the administrative side of me taking over, now that I’ve been department chair for a year, and hope that my materialistic side reasserts itself when my term is over. And looking at the array of paper spread out before me, one thing is patently obvious: there are a lot of queens. Apparently mere mundane paper products are not enough for me; I must have royalty.

Just a few of my purchases:

Queen Elizabeth I and Marie Antoinette notebooks from SHHH My Darling.

Queen Elizabeth I and Marie Antoinette note cards by Rifle Paper Co.

Post-marked Photo Album from Campbell Raw Press.

Queen Elizabeth II stamp wrapping paper at Kate‘s Paperie

And a reorder of a perennial favorite, Alexa Pulitzer‘s Royal Elephant mousepad (although I think he’s a king).

8 Comments | tags: Daily Life, Graphic Design, paper, Royalty, Shopping, Stationery | posted in Design, Paper

April 9, 2014

The Princes in the Tower

By daseger

As today marks the accession of Edward V in 1483, I thought I would explore visual representations of one of the most popular mysteries in English history: the princes in the tower. My students certainly love this story: everything stops when we get to this moment, and I have to let them indulge in what if history, at least for a little while. The basic facts are these: the 12-year-old prince succeeded his father Edward IV on April 9, but his uncle Richard, the Duke of Gloucester and Lord Protector, assumed the head of a regency government. The boy king, along with his younger brother Richard, was placed in “protective custody” in the Tower of London (then more of a palace then a prison), from which they never left. The Regent Richard produced evidence of their father’s prior betrothal in June of 1483, invalidating their parents’ marriage, rendering them illegitimate and enabling his own succession; at some point in August or September they disappeared. Two years later, in the end game of the long dynastic struggle that was later romantically labeled the Wars of the Roses, Henry Tudor killed Richard III on the battlefield of Bosworth and proclaimed himself King. The Tudor Dynasty commenced and along with it, the demonization of Richard III, the murderer of the Princes in the Tower, his every own nephews. This was a campaign waged most effectively by Tudor apologists Sir Thomas More in the early part of the sixteenth century, and Shakespeare later on. The skeletal remains of two bodies found in the foundation of a Tower staircase in 1674 were interred in an urn designed by Sir Christopher Wren in Westminster Abbey, marked with the inscription proclaiming that the the young king and his brother were stifled with pillows…by the order of their perfidious uncle Richard the Usurper.

A Sixteenth-century Portrait of Edward V, National Portrait Gallery, London

And that’s been the standard story ever since, despite continuous Riccardian attempts to point out that there were other perfidious candidates, and other scenarios. And there are. The recent discovery of Richard III’s remains renewed interest in his most famous crime for a bit, but really, curiosity about the princes’ fate always seems to be simmering under the surface: there have been repeated calls for the testing of the urn’s remains which royal and church officials have repeatedly resisted, and Westminster Abbey’s official position is that the mortal remains of two young children widely believed since the 17th century to be the princes in the tower, should not be disturbed. So that’s where we are with this story, and that is indeed what the princes in the tower has become: a story about two young children confronted and overwhelmed by evil, close to home. A Grimm tale. While the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries certainly contributed to the outline and character development of this story, it was the nineteenth century that filled in all the details, especially in terms of the all-important visuals. It was actually a late eighteenth-century painting, James Northcote’s Murder of the Princes in the Tower (after Shakespeare’s Richard III) that set the scene which later artists recreated in variants over the next century: young, innocent, blue-eyed angelic boys, increasingly “real”, either sleeping unaware or clutching each other in fear and apprehension, helpless in the face of encroaching evil (which is always more ominous when it is not in the picture).

James Northcote, The Murder of the Princes in the Tower (from William Shakespeare’s “Richard III”), 1786, National Trust, Petworth House; Joseph Mordecai, The Murder of the Princes in the Tower, City of London Corporation, Guildhall Art Gallery; Charles Robert Leslie, The Two Princes in the Tower, 1837, Collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Paul Delaroche, The Princes in the Tower (Edward V and the Duke of York), mid-19th century, Tower of London; Henrietta Mary Ada Ward, The Princes in the Tower, 1861, Touchstones Rochdale; John Everett Millais, The Princes in the Tower, 1878, Royal Holloway, University of London. The work of Millais, setting the boys before the staircase where their supposed remains were later uncovered, has been a particularly influential image.

4 Comments | tags: Art, Commemorations, England, Royalty, Shakespeare | posted in Culture, History

August 9, 2013

Ginger Men

By daseger

Back to Salem and the material world. August is the traditional Americana month in the world of Antiques auctions and shows, and one particular lot from this weekend’s upcoming Skinner Americana auction has me transfixed: Ammi Phillips’ Portrait of a Ginger–haired Young Man, which has an estimate of $15,000-$25,000. What a portrait! Riveting blue eyes, patrician profile, the 19th century hand-in-waistcoat pose, and very notable ginger hair.

Ginger is the preferred term for red hair in the nineteenth century, and before. The relative rarity of this hair color created a folkloric characterization (shiftless, hot-tempered) that endured for centuries. The weakness of William the Conqueror’s heir, William Rufus, was attributed to his hair color, as was the voracious personality of Henry VIII. Much later, the prejudices subsided, but the titles of nineteenth-century portraits of redheaded men, women and children always reference hair color, still the conspicuous characteristic of the sitter.

The assassination of William Rufus, British Library MS Royal 20 A II; the ginger-haired Henry VIII, anonymous artist after Hans Holbein, c. 1600, New College, Oxford University; Portrait miniature of an unknown ginger-haired man (previously thought to be Sr. Francis Drake), bu Isaac Oliver, c. 1590, Victoria & Albert Museum; Two nineteenth-century miniature portraits of ginger-haird men, Skinner Auction Archives; Irish Author J.P. Donleavy’s 1955 picaresque novel The Ginger Man, which (apparently) JOHNNY DEPP is considering bringing to the screen.

5 Comments | tags: Art, Auctions, folklore, Literature, Royalty | posted in Culture, History

March 27, 2013

Seeing Triple

By daseger

Two things turned my attention to triple portraits: a student essay on Renaissance portraiture as an expression of humanism, and the anniversary (today) of King Charles I’s accession to the thrones of England and Scotland in 1625. I was inspired to look (again) at one of my favorite portraits of the Stuart king, the one and only victim of regicide at the close of the English Civil Wars, and to explore the origins of the subgenre of triple portraiture, yet another Renaissance invention. The famous Van Dyck portrait of Charles, painted in 1635 as a study for a marble bust by Lorenzo Bernini, was both influenced by an earlier composition and influential to a future one: Lorenzo Lotto’s Triple Portrait of a Jeweler, the first triple portrait, was in the King’s collection at the time, and across the Channel, Cardinal Richelieu, l’eminence grise, was inspired to have his own triple portrait painted shortly thereafter.

Anthony Van Dyck, “Charles I in Three Positions” (1635), Royal Collection, London; Lorenzo Lotto, “Triple Portrait of a Jeweler” (c. 1530), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; Philippe de Champaigne and studio: “Triple Portrait of Cardinal de Richelieu” (1642), National Gallery of Art, London.

It is interesting that Lotto’s portrait is of an anonymous jeweler, or goldsmith, rather than a “great” man like King Charles or Cardinal Richelieu. It is also more realistic and less impressionistic, and Lotto’s quest for the absolute essence of the jeweler (one perspective is not enough) ultimately gives him more dignity than either the King or the Cardinal, in my opinion. Or it might just be that I know much more about those two!

There is another sixteenth-century triple portrait that I want to include here even thought it’s a bit different–in several ways. It is not like the others in that it is a portrait of three different people, rather than just one person in different “positions” (to use the language of the day), although the artist is definitely playing up their similarity. And appearances are very deceiving in this collective portrait: these profiles do not belong to women, but rather to rather fancifully-dressed (and -tressed) men: the “favorites” of French King Henry III (1551-1589).

“Triple Profile Portrait” (c. 1570). Attributed to Lucas de Heere (Ghent, Belgium, ca. 1534–ca. 1584), Milwaukee Museum of Art.

The triple portrait technique has been used intermittently in the succeeding centuries, to depict both single and collective subjects: the Van Dyck portrait, in particular, has been copied and adapted numerous times, most recently by Hip Hop artist Kehinde Wiley–it really has a life of its own. Norman Rockwell rendered his own self-portrait in triplicate, and also that of Lyndon B. Johnson. Andy Warhol liked the multiple portrait, of course, though went for mere duplication rather than divergent profiles. And to return to royal portraiture (at least another kind of royalty): there were official triple portraits made of both Prince Charles (for the occasion of his 60th birthday) and Princess Diana (in 1987). The latter portrait hangs at Cardiff City Hall in Wales, and was apparently hastily (and temporarily) removed upon the occasion of a visit by Charles and his present wife, Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, in 2005. Just to avoid an awkward “encounter” of sorts.

Andy Warhol, “Triple Elvis” (1963), Fisher Collection, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the portrait painter John Merton (who died just last month) with his triple portrait of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1987. Photo: UPPA/PHOTOSHOT.