Why Is It So Hard To Paint The Queen?

Dan Llywelyn Hall has become the 133rd person to paint the Queen for an official portrait. (Results at left.) And he has become about the 132nd to be met with a bucket of slop from both professional critics and the public. The Queen has become the most pictured person in history – the National Portrait Gallery has 742 different formal images of her, photographs as well as paintings — and many of the paintings have been comically bad. But as a Telegraph article on the subject says: ‘The Queen has reigned over a celluloid age, and maybe it is time her subjects ditched their oils in favour of a camera.’

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