Online ridicule follows release of King Charles III’s official portrait

The first officially commissioned portrait of King Charles III unveiled since he became king has received a divided reaction across social media.

The portrait, created by artist Jonathan Yeo, was commissioned in 2020 to celebrate the Prince of Wales’s 50 years as a member of the Drapers’ Company, which would have occurred in 2022. Instead, the portrait was unveiled Tuesday and has met a mixed reaction online due to its striking, sea-of-pink composition.

About the portrait’s look, Yeo joked to the BBC: “If this was seen as treasonous, I could literally pay for it with my head, which would be an appropriate way for a portrait painter to die — to have their head removed!”

The Guardian gave the painting a one-star review and called it “a pinkish psychedelic splurge,” a “superficially observed and carelessly executed bland banality,” and “a formulaic bit of facile flattery.”

One social media user compared the portrait to Ghostbusters 2 villain Vigo the Carpathian, a medieval sorcerer who haunts a painting.

Various other users took issue with the painting’s heavy color scheme, comparing the king to Tobias Funke’s blue skin paint from Arrested Development from when the character attempted to join the Blue Man Group.

The palace’s Instagram post about the portrait includes a wide variety of reactions, with some saying of the painting, “He has a history of blood on his hands,” “His portrait looks like he’s he’s in hell,” “100% thought this was satire,” and “Charlie looks like he’s been set in strawberry jelly.”

Others responded with a torrent of memes, including comparing the portrait to the scene in The Shining when a spout of blood emerges from an elevator and to Han Solo’s pose after he was frozen in carbonite by bounty hunter Boba Fett in The Empire Strikes Back.

According to ARTNews, Yeo has been commissioned to paint several high-profile portraits before, including “Queen Camila, Prince Philip, former prime minister Tony Blair, Rupert Murdoch, and Damien Hirst.”

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Yeo told the BBC of the portrait, “My interest is really in figuring out who someone is and trying to get that on a canvas.

“On the one hand, we know they’re real people with quirks and personality traits. We’ve seen that much more of them. On the other hand, we still want to buy into the mysticism and the fairy tale that they’re different from us, that there’s a bit of magic there.”