Prince Philip and the Art of Painting

Among the many tributes paid to the late Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, there was mention of the fact that he had visited the Commonwealth of Australia on some twenty-one occasions, including as a Royal Navy officer before his marriage in 1947 to Princess Elizabeth. One aspect of Prince Philip’s life which has been less noticed, given his naval career and prodigious public service to the United Kingdom and to the Commonwealth of Nations as Consort of the Queen, was his interest in the art of painting and his patronage of significant artists, including several Australian artists.

The Prince’s contributions to the building up of the Royal Collections and the Royal Heritage during the Queen’s reign have been very important, especially in the significant effect that his taste had in bringing major artistic talents to greater public notice. His friendship with and encouragement of the splendidly accomplished, yet critically neglected, British painter of landscapes Edward Seago (1910–1974) is well known. Seago also tutored the Prince in the practical arts of painting. Less well known, in Australia at least, was the Prince’s appreciation and fostering of the distinctive work of the brilliant Polish immigrant artist Feliks Topolski. The major Australian artists whose works the Prince encouraged and purchased included Albert Namatjira, Sidney Nolan, William Dobell and Russell Drysdale.

Prince Philip’s support to painters and their art was an important aspect of his life. Given his many other qualities, it serves to underscore how even the most vigorous and indeed martial of personalities can often have an appreciation of and an alertness in the presence of artworks executed by painters of talent, but for which such persons are given scant credit by most of their contemporaries. As in so many other fields, the interest taken by the Prince in painting and painters was important against a background of the mid-twentieth century, when in certain quarters, an interest in painting, or indeed in any of the arts, was often made out to be something deeply suspect. To take another example drawn from the Royal Family, that is demonstrated by what the Queen’s cousin the late Lord Harewood, a leading world authority on the opera and the art of song, reported in his autobiography The Tongs and the Bones about conventional attitudes to any interest in the arts. It seems Edward VIII had once muttered words to the effect, “Yes, we don’t quite know what it is about George and his interest in music: his parents are really quite normal you know, they like dogs and horses and country things in general.”

Likewise, it is perhaps little known that the talents of George VI also extended to the practical art and skill of embroidering sturdy chair coverings, still to be seen at Windsor Castle. The Seventh Earl Spencer, grandfather of Princess Diana, was similarly skilled and deeply involved with the upkeep of his inheritance at Althorp.

Prince Philip came of a major European Royal House, and his patronage of the arts is perhaps another echo of the role of Queen Mary, who in her youth had lived in Florence and having there imbibed a deep appreciation of art and things of beauty, rarity and distinction, carried that interest over into her life in the United Kingdom. From 1917, she and George V stabilised a monarchy recast as the House of Windsor, at a time when other monarchies had disappeared or were deposed and either lost or had to sell their great art and objects collections. Prince Philip followed the earlier example of Prince Albert in his encouragement of better industrial design and architecture and also of painters and sculptors. Thus he was at a far remove from the days of the Hanoverian George II, who had once famously said, in his strong German accent: “I hate all Boets and Bainters!”

Over the years, in addition to published writings of his own, Prince Philip frequently contributed forewords to various publications, including books about various artists. From these we can glean some clearer idea of his encouragement and patronage of the art and skill of painting by artists in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth countries. For example, the Prince wrote the following in his foreword to James Reid’s Edward Seago: The Landscape Art (1991):

I cannot be objective about Edward Seago’s painting. He was a frequent visitor to Sandringham and I used to call on him at his home in Norfolk. We became firm friends and that is why I invited him to join me in the Royal Yacht Britannia for the return journey from the Olympic Games in Melbourne at the end of 1956. The plan was to cross the South Pacific to the Grahamland Peninsula and to see something of the work of what was then known as the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey. This has since changed its name to the British Antarctic Survey. I had no idea of what to expect, but I knew that no artist of any repute had done any work in the Antarctic since Wilson did his marvellous watercolours while he was with the Scott Expedition. I hoped that Ted would find something to challenge his remarkable talent for landscape painting. Neither of us was disappointed. We could hardly tear him away from his easel to come to meals. He was fascinated by the icebergs, the colour of the sea between the drifting pack-ice and the background of glaciers and snow-covered hills. He went on painting as we called at South Georgia, the Falklands, Gough Island, Tristan da Cunha, St Helena, Ascension Island and the Gambia. The novelty of the light and landscape of these unfamiliar places fascinated him and the rest of us were fascinated by his almost miraculous technique. He had a knack of capturing a scene with a speed and dexterity that rivalled that of a conjuror.

The Prince took some lessons from Seago and the outcome was a number of paintings which were illustrated in a 1981 BBC book by Plumb and Wheldon on the Royal Heritage. It is notable that the Prince in his foreword to Reid’s book on Seago makes no mention of his own efforts at painting under Seago’s kind tutelage. Such modesty in the face of major painterly expertise was part of the Prince’s trademark reticence and courtesy, notwithstanding other ebullient moments. I am informed that on his visits to Australia, Prince Philip was always delighted not only to discuss Seago’s work, but those of major Australian artists as well.

Later on, landscape works by Edward Seago entered the Royal Collection. Some examples are featured in Plumb and Wheldon’s book: Antarctic Scene, The John Biscoe in the Antarctic, Evening on the Hard, Pin Mill, West African Market, Selikini and Buckingham Palace from St James’ Park. In addition, as a result of their friendship over the years, the Prince personally acquired other works by Seago for his private collection.

This princely and friendly patronage was important for Seago, who had major talents and high skill as a painter but was routinely disregarded by the bien-pensants amongst the British art critics’ “establishment”. Plumb and Wheldon note that whilst the Royal Collections in the twentieth century gained works by most of the leading British contemporary artists, the relationship with Seago was special:

the patronage of Edward Seago … rapidly ripened into friendship with three generations of the Royal Family. Seago had acquired a huge popular reputation in the years immediately after the War—queues formed outside Colnaghi’s in Bond Street on the opening of an exhibition and people scrambled in to buy. The Royal Academy, however, ignored him: so did the critics. He painted both in oils and watercolour, both portraits and landscapes. He could catch a quick likeness with a touch of de Laszlo’s panache, but landscape was his primary interest. He was extremely sympathetic to the wind-driven skies and the shimmering marshes of Norfolk. His brush was very facile, his colours pure and mysteriously life-enhancing. He was light years away from all that was fashionable with the world of art or of Bloomsbury. He was, however, securely locked in the tradition of the great East Anglian painters, a true descendant of old Crome and Constable who are now revered.

In the forties, he painted a lively portrait of King George VI and did three impressionistic studies of the wedding procession of Princess Elizabeth and Lieutenant Mountbatten. By then he was in high favour with all the members of the Royal Family and Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother) invited him to Sandringham in January 1950. For the next twenty-two years he visited Sandringham regularly both in winter and summer and the Royal Family acquired numerous dazzling Seagos …

 Seago remains the only artist of quality to have painted [the] strange lunar landscapes of the far South. Later he gave lessons to the Prince of Wales. Both father and son greatly admired his skill and creative energy and they loved his pictures. This royal support was extremely important to Seago who was a deeply insecure man, wounded by the neglect and hostility not only of art critics but also of the artistic establishment as represented by the Royal Academy. As well as strengthening his confidence, the royal patronage also gave him the opportunity to paint landscapes of countries he would never have seen or visited. One can argue that Seago was not in the class of Sutherland or Bacon or Hitchens and many other painters of deeper creative talent, but he was thoroughly accomplished in a deeply English tradition and his work will be remembered long after the brick arrangers, the minimalists and the rest are forgotten.

Another example of a major artistic talent encouraged and assisted by Prince Philip whilst accorded only the belated recognition of the British art establishment was Feliks Topolski (1907–1989). He came to London in 1935 and was an official war artist for both the British government and the Polish government-in-exile from 1940 to 1945. After witnessing sea encounters in the Arctic, the campaign against the Japanese in Burma and of China’s endurance, Topolski accompanied the Polish 2nd Corps in Italy and the Allied advance into Germany. He followed the troops who entered the death camp of Belsen; and ultimately in 1946, he attended the trials of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. Afterwards, he produced a remarkable body of work in paintings and drawings.

He had a very distinctive drawing style, developed to a high degree during the 1930s in Paris. He gained wide renown in Britain at the end of the 1950s and early 1960s when he was commissioned by the BBC to do on-set drawings of most of the subjects being interviewed by John Freeman for his Face to Face television series, including Evelyn Waugh, Dame Edith Sitwell, Sir Herbert Read, Arnold Wesker and William Empson, amongst many other prominent personalities. Prince Philip acquired many of these sketches by Topolski, which now hang in a corridor in the Private Apartments at Windsor Castle.

In his foreword to the magnificent book Topolski’s Buckingham Palace Panoramas (1977) Prince Philip wrote:

I came to admire and enjoy the work of Feliks Topolski during the War. He had already developed an unerring eye for the quirks of human nature which his vivid drawings translated into a gently satirical commentary on the social scene. Years later we met and I was both intrigued and stimulated by the originality and independence of his views.

Plumb and Wheldon comment:

because the Prince found [Topolski’s] drawings so striking, he commissioned Topolski to paint the Coronation Procession. This again was very much in the royal tradition, for George IV had his procession painted in a huge book, one of the largest books ever made and opulent with gold leaf. Before this, there had been prints of the Hanoverian and Stuart Coronation Processions. Topolski’s painting now takes up a very long wall in a corridor in Buckingham Palace. It is vivid, lively, somewhat jumbled in the Topolski manner … and in some mysterious way it is dominated by the figure of Winston Churchill. In 1953, his prestige was vast and all eyes watched him as he moved slowly up the aisle at Westminster Abbey on that June morning.

The Prince acquired some of Topolski’s 1953 Coronation Drawings but later had the inspiration for a panorama by Topolski for Buckingham Palace. He wrote of this in 1977: “It is a fascinating contemporary record by a master of visual commentary of a great state occasion presented in his own highly individual idiom.” It is an enduring monument to Topolski and the Prince.

Plumb and Wheldon’s 1981 book shows Prince Philip at Windsor Castle in front of Drysdale’s Man in a Landscape and Dobell’s Country Race Meeting. They also illustrate watercolours by Namatjira and by Rex Battarbee, noting that Prince Philip, during his 1956 visit to Australia in connection with the Olympic Games at Melbourne, went to Alice Springs where he bought a number of landscapes of Central Australian scenes by Aboriginal artists. In 1963, the Prince was again in Australia and acquired two watercolours by Battarbee, who had originally encouraged and advised the Aboriginal artists of the Central Australian school, who benefited greatly after royal purchases of their works.

After visiting Australia in 1949 at the invitation of the National Gallery of Melbourne to advise on the building up of its collection and its presentation in a new building (which was to be completed in 1968) Sir Kenneth Clark developed a great enthusiasm for the work of Australian artists and in particular for the work of Sidney Nolan. In the 1950s, this interest in Australian art developed in London art circles and by 1955 Colin MacInnes’s landmark article discussing Nolan’s “Ned Kelly” series of works had appeared in Encounter magazine. One major Nolan painting in the Royal Collection and illustrated in Plumb and Wheldon’s book is Herd at a Waterhole. Several other Nolans are included in the Royal Collection. Plumb and Wheldon note that the Royal Collection is “particularly rich in works by Australian artists”. 

In his important and influential study Patrons and Painters (1963, 1980) Francis Haskell has powerfully reminded us of the capital importance, over history, of the effect of the patronage of princes for the encouragement of art and artists, whether by princes of the church or secular princes. Prince Philip may not have amassed vast collections like those of King Charles I or Catherine the Great, but in his own modest way and in a manner which assisted numerous artists to come into greater public prominence, he augmented the Royal Collections and also formed a quality private collection. And from the point of view of us in Australia, he not only visited most, if not all, of the major Australian state public galleries, but was also present supporting Her Majesty the Queen when she graciously performed the formal opening of the National Gallery of Australia (at first named the “Australian National Gallery”, but later revised to the more conventional and practical format, reflecting the usual international gallery practice) in Canberra in 1982. All of this is part of the enduring legacy of that man of many parts who was the Prince Philip, Consort of the Queen and a patron of painting.

Dr Douglas Hassall, a frequent contributor on art, lives in Canberra. He wrote on the Australian-born painter Henry Lamb in the May issue