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Kate Middleton's Terrible Official Portrait: Awful Or Awfully Awesome
By
Jen Chung
Published Jan 11, 2013
Modified Jan 11, 2013
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By
Jen Chung
Published Jan 11, 2013
Modified Jan 11, 2013
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She may be married to a prince, but she can't even command a decent portrait! The official portrait of Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, was unveiled yesterday and it proved that the Royal Family might be blind and/or are great liars. Prince William said, "It's beautiful, it's absolutely beautiful," while Kate said, "It's just amazing, I thought it was brilliant."
The portrait was painted by Paul Emsley, who said, "The Duchess explained to me that she would like to be portrayed naturally—her natural self as opposed to her official self. She struck me as enormously open and generous and a very warm person... After initially feeling it was going to be an unsmiling portrait, I think it was the right choice in the end to have her smiling—that is really who she is." But she looks like she's two or three decades older and in desperate need of a moisturizing mask!
The Daily Beast's royal observer, Tom Sykes, is furious:
Believe it or not, this is not some provocative project cooked up by an attention seeking art student (or Morrissey) aiming to show us what Kate would look like if she was twenty years older, smoked, never washed her hair and ate junk food, but her first official portrait...
Can this jowly face that will now be staring at us from the walls of the National Portrait Galler—of which, to add insult to injury, she is patron—for all eternity really be the same woman who has so effortlessly dazzled the world's media with her looks over the past few years? Is that scratchy rug atop her head really meant to be Kate's famously silken locks? And what's going on with the mean, wierdly spaced eyes? And don't get me started on the nose. It's a hooter you'd only be delighted with if you were a snowman.
However, our own John Del Signore argues that the painting might actually be the "sickest royal van airbrushing EVER."
Tagged
Duchess of Cambridge
kate middleton
portrait
prince william
Royal family
Jen Chung
Jen Chung is a former WNYC and Gothamist editor.
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