Annigoni’s great 1950s painting of the Queen goes on show for the first time in 26 years in the Diamond Jubilee Exhibition

One of the greatest royal por­traits of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, Pietro Annigoni’s 1954–5 paint­ing of The Queen is to go on pub­lic dis­play for the first time in 26 years at the National Portrait’s Gallery’s The Queen: Art and Image exhib­i­tion, it was announced today.

It will be shown on the same wall as the artist’s second cel­eb­rated full-length por­trait of The Queen com­mis­sioned by the Gal­lery in 1969, the first time these por­traits will ever have been seen together for over a quarter of a cen­tury and only the second time ever.

Since it was first shown at the Royal Academy in 1955, the paint­ing has only been loaned twice, in 1958 and 1986, by its own­ers The Fish­mon­gers’ Com­pany, one of the City of Lon­don Liv­ery Com­pan­ies, from Fish­mon­gers Hall, where the paint­ing occu­pies a prom­in­ent pos­i­tion. This refined paint­ing in tem­pera, oil and ink on paper on can­vas, reflects the artist’s fas­cin­a­tion with Italian renais­sance tech­niques. When shown at the Royal Academy, it drew crowds said to be ten-deep with view­ers fas­cin­ated by the portrait’s ideal­ised yet pen­et­rat­ing character.

This spec­tac­u­lar new addi­tion to the Gallery’s tour­ing exhib­i­tion – open­ing in Lon­don tomor­row, 17 May 2012, ahead of The Queen’s Dia­mond Jubilee week­end cel­eb­ra­tions – will be dis­played along­side some of the most remark­able and res­on­ant images of Eliza­beth II across 60 years of her reign, includ­ing those by Lucian Freud, Gil­bert and George, Cecil Beaton, Andy War­hol, Annie Leibovitz and Lord Snowdon.

Annigoni’s grand, full-length paint­ing Queen Eliza­beth II, Queen Regent, shows the recently crowned, 28-year-old Eliza­beth wear­ing her mag­ni­fi­cent Garter robes, and depic­ted against a pas­toral land­scape. The paint­ing was promp­ted by an obser­va­tion made by The Queen while the artist was mak­ing a pre­par­at­ory sketch in Buck­ing­ham Palace:

When I was a little child, it always delighted me to look out of the win­dow and see the people and traffic going by.

The res­ult­ing work shows a mon­arch in a sylvan idyll yet out­ward look­ing and con­nec­ted to her surroundings.

It is seen next to Annigoni’s life-size 1969 com­mis­sion for the National Por­trait Gal­lery depict­ing the mon­arch again in cere­mo­nial robes but now stand­ing against an ambigu­ous, spare and gloomy, plain back­ground. While both por­traits were greeted by enorm­ous pub­lic and press interest, the later work adop­ted a rad­ic­ally dif­fer­ent approach from the romantic view of the earlier por­trait. Anni­goni said:

I did not want to paint her as a film star, I saw her as a mon­arch, alone in the prob­lems of her responsibility.

 

Left: Queen Eliza­beth II, Queen Regent by Pietro Anni­goni, 1954–5 © The Fish­mon­gers’ Com­pany
Right: Queen Eliza­beth II by Pietro Anni­goni, 1969 © National Por­trait Gal­lery, London

THE QUEEN: ART & IMAGE - National Por­trait Gal­lery, Lon­don
From 17 May until 21 Octo­ber 2012
Tick­ets: www.npg.org.uk/thequeen

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