It was supposed to quieten the out-of-control internet theories surrounding the health of the Princess of Wales, but somehow an innocuous family portrait released on Mothering Sunday has only fanned the flames, after it was pulled by five major picture agencies for reported “manipulation.” While Catherine has since apologized for the mistakes of an “amateur photographer,” the incident has prompted much debate over the accuracy and honesty of royal photography.
“This whole question of reality and accuracy in royal images is a very recent one,” explains historian Sarah Gristwood. “The idea that a portrait should be warts and all would have been a deeply weird one in previous centuries. But there have been two great changes along the way—the first being the invention of photography. The second has come with the internet much more recently.”
Throughout history, kings and queens have wanted to be seen as impressive to both their subjects and their rivals, so it’s unsurprising that their royal portraits showed them in their best light. After all, centuries ago it’s not as though there were many who could dispute the accuracy of their image—there were no cameras, television, or social media then. “When Elizabeth I was in her 60s, she was being painted with the so-called ‘mask of youth’,” shares Gristwood. “Charles I was painted to look taller, George IV was probably painted to look slimmer—if you look at pictures of him and then hear the stories—and Henry VII undoubtedly was painted to look more impressive. Painted portraiture has always been the artist’s vision of the monarch, tempered by what the monarch wants them to see. It was just considered a realistic part of the PR machine. The idea of spin isn’t new—what’s new is the idea of spin being called out.”
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.”
Cecil Beaton, a favorite photographer of the Queen Mother, Queen Elizabeth II, and Princess Margaret, was a fan of retouching, but prior to digital techniques would have to use white paint to tidy up bits he didn’t like, painting directly onto the negatives. “Retouching was a given when Cecil Beaton photographed the royal family from 1939 onwards,” explains Muir. “I cannot believe there is a finished vintage print in the V&A’s repository of Beaton’s royal images that has not been scrutinized by the retoucher’s pencil and scalpel. It’s always been like that—it’s just that the means of making it happen have changed… and the public is more attuned to it.”
Yet the royals haven’t always played ball with the glow-ups, as Russell explains: “The Queen Mother admitted to Beaton that she had felt “so very ugly” in the 1937 coronation photographs, so when he photographed her again in 1939, he used very soft lighting. Yet in 1950 when he retouched her 50th birthday pictures to make her look lighter, she sent them back saying that they were too perfect and he could ‘put the extra chin back in’.”
In 1999, the photographer Sir Geoffrey Shakerley admitted to digitally altering the wedding photos of Prince Edward and Sophie Rhys-Jones. While reports vary on whether 17-year-old Prince William was looking away or scowling, the end result was that Sir Geoffrey cut and pasted a picture of William from earlier in the day and superimposed it onto the group shot. “It was a spur-of-the-moment decision by Sir Geoffrey, to show Prince William in the best light as well as reflecting his jubilant mood,” shared the photographer’s assistant, Robert Simpson, afterwards. Meanwhile, some of the shorter guests were also asked to stand on phone books, which were also digitally removed.
Of course, the furor over the Princess of Wales’s Photoshop fail is in part down to the intense speculation surrounding the family at the moment, and you can’t help but feel that previous gaffes have been swept under the carpet or ignored. In December, for example, Prince William and Kate’s Christmas card photograph was thought to have a few inaccuracies—a missing finger for Louis, an extra foot for someone else—but it wasn’t picked up widely. Similarly, a photograph released in the summer of 2022 of the late Queen Elizabeth II with eight of her great-grandchildren and two of her grandchildren—all smiling and looking at the camera—was suspected of being the result of some tactical cutting and pasting. Yet neither of these moments prompted much attention.
“This has been going on for decades, but we are at a moment when the public is becoming increasingly concerned with what technology can do,” concludes Russell. “So in a way, the backlash against the Princess of Wales is a push-back against this. Maybe it’s best to follow the late Queen Mother’s example, and put the extra chin back in.”