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A small painting in tempera and sepia ink by Mary Anne Aytoun Ellis, showing two First Nation chieftains on horseback, forms part of an exhibition of works by the artists who have accompanied King Charles on royal tours over the last 40 years, which opens tomorrow at Buckingham Palace. The serene work does not fully reflect the traumatic honour of accepting the palace invitations, often at only a few weeks notice.
The 2001 trip to Canada when Aytoun Ellis created the work was her second tour, and so the artist knew what to expect when keeping up with the fast moving royal convoy, with multiple events from dawn to dinner packed into every day, and stops sometimes lasting only minutes. Like a surprising number of the artists included in The King’s Tour Artists she did not use a camera, relying on painting on the spot and memory. This was made all the more difficult by her choice of the fast drying medium of egg bound tempera.
As the exhibition’s accompanying book of interviews with all the surviving artists records, they generally received minimal directions, left entirely free to decide what to record and how. The most recent work, made only a few months ago in Ravenna and missing the deadline for the book, is a print from an iPad drawing by Fraser Scarfe.
A labrador and leaping buffalo
However, in Canada the then-Prince of Wales made a special request for Aytoun Ellis to include a view of a buffalo leap—cliff sites where First Nation hunters historically drove prey to their deaths. Absolutely, the artist said. Urgent phone calls to identify a site to witness this then began, a special jeep trip was organised with a local guide and half a dozen eggs—essential to Aytoun Ellis’s process—were begged from the royal chef.
As the group, accompanied by the guide’s labrador, reached the spot, they heard a crunching noise: the ever hungry dog had found the eggs. And as the artist prepared in a panic to switch to water colour, it knocked over her water jar too. The final version of the work was achieved in water colour using a can of lager, but has not made the cut for the exhibition.
The tradition of artists joining royal tours began in 1985, when the then-Prince Charles invited his painting tutor, the late John Ward, to become the first official tour artist. The exhibition includes Ward’s view of the Royal Ensign flying from the stern of the royal yacht Britannia, side by side with the Charles’s slightly wonkier view of the same scene. Since then 43 artists have visited 95 countries, and produced 300 paintings for the personal collection of the King, who pays the full expenses of the artists himself.
“You hit the ground running,” says Peter Kuhfeld, a veteran of several tours. However for some, including Toby Ward who was still an art student when first invited, the first priority was acquiring the required formal suit to wear. In 2012, meanwhile, Sue Wild made a special apron with myriad pockets for brushes, pencils and pigments.
In 2000, Marcus Cornish, the only sculptor, acquired a heavy wooden box with many little drawers, which he filled with pieces of clay and carried everywhere on a leather strap. Cornish’s plan to sculpt on the spot proved impossible, but his tender bust of a Second World War veteran in Slovakia, made in his studio from his drawings, is included.
Sunstroke and protocol consternation
The King’s Tour Artists, which fills the palace’s grand ballroom, is included in the summer opening of Buckingham Palace, where visitors may also see the much debated state portraits of the King and Queen newly installed in the Throne Room. The short list of which paintings to include in the show was made by Charles himself, and the final selection was by curator Kate Heard. “It was a wonderful list, this has been a joy to work on,” she says.
Most works are being shown in public for the first time, with many paintings being taken out of storage and from the walls of several royal homes, including Highgrove in the Cotswolds. This was the brainchild of the Earl of Rosslyn, Peter St Clair-Erskine, who was in charge of security on many tours as a serving police officer, and now personal secretary to the King and Queen.
St Clair-Erskine described the artists as well behaved—presumably less trouble than the media, though the secretary politely chose not to comment on this comparison. However, there were moments of concern. In 1986 Martin Yeoman was arrested as a spy while sitting sketching in the shade of an Omani police station, Robbie Wraith left red chalk marks on Nelson Mandela’s table cloth in 1997, and Peter Kuhfeld got sunstroke in the Arabian Desert in 2004.
St Clair-Erskine’s main problem was that the artists repeatedly got absorbed in their work and kept being late for the convoy as the circus moved on, often hundreds of miles to the next stop. One caused protocol consternation by rushing back onto a reception on Britannia via the gangplank reserved for royalty. “We never actually left anyone behind—but it was by a hair’s breadth on several occasions,” he recalls with a shudder.
- The King’s Tour Artists, Buckingham Palace, 10 July–28 September
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