One of the only times a royal portrait was notably attacked for being fraudulent occurred almost 500 years ago, during the Tudor period. “The last time there was this much fuss about the portrait of a future queen of England was when Hans Holbein painted Anne of Cleves in the 1530s for Henry VIII,” says Gristwood. “Henry fell in love with the portrait but famously, when he met her, he found the reality was that she was nothing like the picture at all.”
The desire for the royals to be seen as “just like us” is a relatively modern concept, popularised during the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, and coinciding with the widespread use of photography and the arrival of television. Indeed, the verisimilitude of photographs in their very nature is what makes them so popular amongst the royal family for marking specific occasions, all tapping into the late Queen’s maxim that they had to “be seen to be believed.” It’s why they frequently release “candid” photographs to mark various occasions—from birthdays to Christmas—but we should not forget that there is always a specific intention behind these images, as with the Wales’s Mother’s Day snap. We are aware, too, that these images have been edited in some way—to remove a creased shirt, or an out-of-place hair—and it’s not really fair to dub this as “dishonest” or “inaccurate,” as has been the case with this recent photograph.
“The manipulation of the finished image in order to render a harmonious whole goes back to the dawn of photography,” shares Vogue contributor Robin Muir. “The invention of the photograph coincided almost exactly with Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne in 1837, and her husband Albert really understood its impact and that it could be a significant propaganda tool. For example, when a daguerreotype of Victoria was taken and she happened to move at the wrong moment, it showed her with her eyes shut. When she saw it, she defaced it with her thumb and called for another—there was no question she was going to allow an image perceived as ‘wrong’ to be released into the public domain, no matter that it was ‘candid’ and ‘truthful’,” says Muir.
Similarly, Princess Alexandra, the Diana of her day, was edited in the coronation shots of 1902, as royal historian Gareth Russell explains. “She was very beautiful, but they decided to smooth out her wrinkles, so in the untouched negatives, she looks like a really attractive woman in her 60s, but in the retouched ones, it’s a really attractive woman in her 40s.”