May 14, 2024
Seeing Red: Jonathan Yeo's Striking First Portrait of King Charles III
The first official painted portrait of King Charles III since his coronation — a near-monochrome blaze of red by Jonathan Yeo — divided opinion the moment it was unveiled.
When the curtain dropped at Buckingham Palace in May 2024, the room gasped. Jonathan Yeo's first official portrait of King Charles III since the coronation showed the monarch dissolving into a vivid field of red, a butterfly hovering near his shoulder.
Yeo said the colour echoed Charles's military uniform and his fiery, transformative life; the butterfly nodded to the King's lifelong environmentalism and his metamorphosis from prince to sovereign. Critics and the public split instantly — bold and modern to some, unsettling to others.
Love it or loathe it, the portrait did what royal portraiture rarely manages now: it got the whole country talking about a painting.
Image: “Buckingham Palace, London - April 2009” — Diliff, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.