Prince Charles is filmed wandering lonely as a cloud on the Balmoral estate — and does a pretty good job of painting them too.
He has allowed the cameras behind the scenes for the first time to view the family artistic archive in the library at Windsor Castle for an ITV documentary called Royal Paintbox, allowing him to express his passion for painting — and solitude.
Charles has never received formal training. His father, the Duke of Edinburgh, was his first teacher and the film shows some examples of Philip’s own work. One is an intimate and affectionate portrait of the Queen seated at her breakfast table in her private dining room at Windsor, surrounded by paintings of horses. She is dressed in a short-sleeved summer dress and reading a newspaper.
Painting gives Charles a chance to escape from his public life, but in the film he reveals how he is also concerned about his personal legacy
On the table is a loaf and some marmalade, and a wooden letter rack for the morning post. It was painted almost 60 years ago. Other examples of Philip’s work include a cloud formation above a coastal landscape and a rocky coastal outcrop.
The Queen herself showed early promise with a black-and-white lino cut of a horse rearing up on its hind legs in a circus ring. She made it aged eight or nine for her parents, signing it Elizabeth of York. ‘Jolly good of the horse,’ says Charles, ‘obviously done for Christmas or a birthday.’
Her younger sister Princess Margaret, known for her lifelong patronage of the arts, had her own flair. In 1957, she designed a stylish royal blue Regency-style teaset for Spode.
In her first major interview, Margaret’s daughter Lady Sarah Chatto, a professional artist, pays tribute to her mother’s artistic talents. ‘When she was little, she was surrounded by all these beautiful things, and I think she wanted to pass something down to my brother [David Linley], and me,’ she says. ‘She was very artistic and had an amazing brain.’
The Royals’ artistic inheritance is shown to stretch back to Mary Queen of Scots. The film explains how Mary’s art flourished during her 19-year imprisonment under the orders of Elizabeth I.
He has developed his own technique of taking a sheet of paper and a pen with him on walks and sketching the view, noting suggestions for colour and light
Mary’s medium was embroidery, and according to historian Lady Antonia Fraser, ‘it’s the first serious art in the Royal Family’.
In one work, of a phoenix and vine tapestry, the symbolism is clear, says Lady Antonia. ‘The vine indicates that if you cut me down, further shoots will spring up, with other branches, other leaves, because I have a son and a family, which will go on and multiply.’
Painting clearly gives Charles a chance to escape from his public life, but in the film he reveals how he is also concerned about his personal legacy.
‘You know, we walk away and shuffle off our mortal coil but these things live on. That’s what’s so riveting about looking at other members of my family in the past,’ he tells film-maker Margy Kinmonth. ‘It’s this feeling that there they were sitting doing the painting and then that stays behind. It’s still you. It’s a part of you that’s still there. The rest of you is gone.’
He pays tribute to the late Queen Mother’s role in opening his eyes: ‘I think it was my grandmother probably who inspired me, or encouraged me, to look and observe.
‘I used to sit myself out on the hill and I’d try and mix things and it would rain and everything went spotty. And then it was “Oh God”,’ he says in exasperation. ‘So I eventually decided years later that I’d do it all inside.’
He has developed his own technique of taking a sheet of paper and a pen with him on walks and sketching the view, noting suggestions for colour and light and painting the scene in comfort later.
Prince Charles stands in front of a display of his water colours, revealing an extraordinary treasure trove of rarely seen artworks by members of the Royal Family
His love of Balmoral is clearly profound and an endless source of inspiration. We see him interviewed on the windswept misty moorland, with snow-capped mountains in the background.
‘I have tramped across the hills endlessly for the last 60 years,’ says the Prince. ‘They become indelibly part of your life and soul really. It’s the light on the landscape, on the mountains, and the shadows, that’s the thing that really catches the attention and it doesn’t happen very often funnily enough.’
In Charles’s studio, an easel rests against a wall, tubes of paint are lined up in trays and there’s an unfinished watercolour of Huna Mill, near John O’Groats.
‘Painting is almost meditative in the sense that you enter another world,’ he says. ‘It’s most extraordinary. Everything else is excluded.’
He doesn’t, however, make any claims to be a great artist. ‘The great thing is you begin to realise something like this will look much better further away,’ he says, indicating the Huna Mill. ‘I think at about 100 yards it’d look quite good!’
His praise is reserved for ancestors like King George III, who he feels has been dealt a rough hand by history. ‘Everybody’s taught that King George III was the mad king. But in the library at Windsor Castle are some of the most remarkable and beautiful treasures, which I hope will redress this simplistic view of him.’
George III acquired thousands of Old Master drawings and paintings and these, with his collection of books and maps, formed the nucleus of the British Library.
‘The end of 1788 saw the onset of the first serious bout of the King’s illness now recognised as porphyria [an enzyme deficiency that attacks the nervous system]. I discovered the other day that he was using products for his hair that may have had arsenic in. It could be that the use of arsenic in some of these or in medications made his delusions and the awful delirium this poor man went through even worse,’ says Charles.
But the most emotionally revealing royal artist, however inadvertently, was Charles’s great-great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria. The documentary begins with her cylindrical paintbox being opened.
This was the vehicle for her solace after the death of her beloved husband, Albert.
She left behind thousands of paintings from her 40 years of mourning. ‘The tragic thing about all this I think is that these ones are all done after Prince Albert’s death and they’d always have things like “The third year of my desolation, 1864”,’ says the Prince.
Victoria virtually stopped painting her children and stuck to empty landscapes.
Charles also traces talented artists on his father’s side, and is amused by an expedition to India his paternal great-great-grandfather, Prince Louis Battenberg, went on with the then Prince of Wales, later to become Edward VII, his great-great-grandfather on his mother’s side. Louis painted a manacled tiger presented by a Maharajah.
Since 1985, Charles has taken an official artist on foreign trips at his own expense to capture what the camera can’t.
‘Painting is so much more fascinating in posterity terms than photographs,’ he says. ‘And it keeps the tradition in The Royal Collection going.’
n Royal Paintbox is on ITV, Tuesday at 10.35pm. The exhibition Royal Paintbox: Royal Artists Past And Present is at the Drawings Gallery, Windsor Castle, from June 22 to January 24 next year.
He has allowed the cameras behind the scenes for the first time to view the family artistic archive in the library at Windsor Castle for an ITV documentary called Royal Paintbox, allowing him to express his passion for painting — and solitude.
Charles has never received formal training. His father, the Duke of Edinburgh, was his first teacher and the film shows some examples of Philip’s own work. One is an intimate and affectionate portrait of the Queen seated at her breakfast table in her private dining room at Windsor, surrounded by paintings of horses. She is dressed in a short-sleeved summer dress and reading a newspaper.
Painting gives Charles a chance to escape from his public life, but in the film he reveals how he is also concerned about his personal legacy
On the table is a loaf and some marmalade, and a wooden letter rack for the morning post. It was painted almost 60 years ago. Other examples of Philip’s work include a cloud formation above a coastal landscape and a rocky coastal outcrop.
The Queen herself showed early promise with a black-and-white lino cut of a horse rearing up on its hind legs in a circus ring. She made it aged eight or nine for her parents, signing it Elizabeth of York. ‘Jolly good of the horse,’ says Charles, ‘obviously done for Christmas or a birthday.’
Her younger sister Princess Margaret, known for her lifelong patronage of the arts, had her own flair. In 1957, she designed a stylish royal blue Regency-style teaset for Spode.
In her first major interview, Margaret’s daughter Lady Sarah Chatto, a professional artist, pays tribute to her mother’s artistic talents. ‘When she was little, she was surrounded by all these beautiful things, and I think she wanted to pass something down to my brother [David Linley], and me,’ she says. ‘She was very artistic and had an amazing brain.’
The Royals’ artistic inheritance is shown to stretch back to Mary Queen of Scots. The film explains how Mary’s art flourished during her 19-year imprisonment under the orders of Elizabeth I.
He has developed his own technique of taking a sheet of paper and a pen with him on walks and sketching the view, noting suggestions for colour and light
Mary’s medium was embroidery, and according to historian Lady Antonia Fraser, ‘it’s the first serious art in the Royal Family’.
In one work, of a phoenix and vine tapestry, the symbolism is clear, says Lady Antonia. ‘The vine indicates that if you cut me down, further shoots will spring up, with other branches, other leaves, because I have a son and a family, which will go on and multiply.’
Painting clearly gives Charles a chance to escape from his public life, but in the film he reveals how he is also concerned about his personal legacy.
‘You know, we walk away and shuffle off our mortal coil but these things live on. That’s what’s so riveting about looking at other members of my family in the past,’ he tells film-maker Margy Kinmonth. ‘It’s this feeling that there they were sitting doing the painting and then that stays behind. It’s still you. It’s a part of you that’s still there. The rest of you is gone.’
He pays tribute to the late Queen Mother’s role in opening his eyes: ‘I think it was my grandmother probably who inspired me, or encouraged me, to look and observe.
‘I used to sit myself out on the hill and I’d try and mix things and it would rain and everything went spotty. And then it was “Oh God”,’ he says in exasperation. ‘So I eventually decided years later that I’d do it all inside.’
He has developed his own technique of taking a sheet of paper and a pen with him on walks and sketching the view, noting suggestions for colour and light and painting the scene in comfort later.
Prince Charles stands in front of a display of his water colours, revealing an extraordinary treasure trove of rarely seen artworks by members of the Royal Family
His love of Balmoral is clearly profound and an endless source of inspiration. We see him interviewed on the windswept misty moorland, with snow-capped mountains in the background.
‘I have tramped across the hills endlessly for the last 60 years,’ says the Prince. ‘They become indelibly part of your life and soul really. It’s the light on the landscape, on the mountains, and the shadows, that’s the thing that really catches the attention and it doesn’t happen very often funnily enough.’
In Charles’s studio, an easel rests against a wall, tubes of paint are lined up in trays and there’s an unfinished watercolour of Huna Mill, near John O’Groats.
‘Painting is almost meditative in the sense that you enter another world,’ he says. ‘It’s most extraordinary. Everything else is excluded.’
He doesn’t, however, make any claims to be a great artist. ‘The great thing is you begin to realise something like this will look much better further away,’ he says, indicating the Huna Mill. ‘I think at about 100 yards it’d look quite good!’
His praise is reserved for ancestors like King George III, who he feels has been dealt a rough hand by history. ‘Everybody’s taught that King George III was the mad king. But in the library at Windsor Castle are some of the most remarkable and beautiful treasures, which I hope will redress this simplistic view of him.’
George III acquired thousands of Old Master drawings and paintings and these, with his collection of books and maps, formed the nucleus of the British Library.
‘The end of 1788 saw the onset of the first serious bout of the King’s illness now recognised as porphyria [an enzyme deficiency that attacks the nervous system]. I discovered the other day that he was using products for his hair that may have had arsenic in. It could be that the use of arsenic in some of these or in medications made his delusions and the awful delirium this poor man went through even worse,’ says Charles.
But the most emotionally revealing royal artist, however inadvertently, was Charles’s great-great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria. The documentary begins with her cylindrical paintbox being opened.
This was the vehicle for her solace after the death of her beloved husband, Albert.
She left behind thousands of paintings from her 40 years of mourning. ‘The tragic thing about all this I think is that these ones are all done after Prince Albert’s death and they’d always have things like “The third year of my desolation, 1864”,’ says the Prince.
Victoria virtually stopped painting her children and stuck to empty landscapes.
Charles also traces talented artists on his father’s side, and is amused by an expedition to India his paternal great-great-grandfather, Prince Louis Battenberg, went on with the then Prince of Wales, later to become Edward VII, his great-great-grandfather on his mother’s side. Louis painted a manacled tiger presented by a Maharajah.
Since 1985, Charles has taken an official artist on foreign trips at his own expense to capture what the camera can’t.
‘Painting is so much more fascinating in posterity terms than photographs,’ he says. ‘And it keeps the tradition in The Royal Collection going.’
n Royal Paintbox is on ITV, Tuesday at 10.35pm. The exhibition Royal Paintbox: Royal Artists Past And Present is at the Drawings Gallery, Windsor Castle, from June 22 to January 24 next year.