The Queen is the last Royal icon

From fairytale and formal to satirical and subversive – the art and photography that depict Her Majesty the Queen reveal some interesting truths. Holly Williams takes a look.

When Cecil Beaton photographed Her Majesty the Queen to mark her Coronation, in 1953, it was – as you might expect – in full pomp, with orb and sceptre, crown and robes, her golden throne standing tall amid the grandeur of Westminster Abbey… Except, well, it wasn't. The backdrop is fake; a mere image of the place where she was crowned queen. The picture was actually shot in a room at Buckingham Palace, with Westminster Abbey represented by a theatrical cloth: a stage set on which the Queen plays her part.

Looking at it today, it seems faintly preposterous – a fairy-tale image, the backdrop something that could practically have come out of an early hand-painted Disney film. But it's also the perfect set-up for the monarch's lifetime of being photographed and painted – its very unreality both elevating and protecting her.

Despite having sat for hundreds of official portraits – and inspiring countless unofficial artworks – the Queen remains inscrutable: a pure performance of a role. We think of the art of portraiture as being about capturing some essence or intangible, defining character, yet portrait after portrait of the Queen fails to deliver any revelation. There's never been a true public "a-ha!" moment, when we think we see the woman behind the crown.

Of course, there are candid snaps that capture fleeting, unstaged moments – witness Patrick Lichfield's lovely, sunny photograph of The Queen on board HMY Britannia (1972), where she's laughing at the fact that he's being dunked in a pool (waterproof camera cannily in hand), or Mark Stewart's hilarious image of her recoiling from scones, The Queen is taken by surprise as she takes tea with Eton schoolboys at Guards Polo Club (2003). But when it comes to formal portraiture she remains, well, formal. And Her Majesty is no doubt well trained in this: after 70 years of dutiful public service, of following what now feel like old-fashioned protocols, it's perhaps unsurprising that she doesn't want to let her guard down for some artist.

The Queen doesn't need to be #relatable: she continues to often be pictured in full regalia, like some sumptuous suit of protective armour, its theatrical grandeur a reminder that she is not like us, and nor, perhaps, should we wish her to be. Certainly, this pageantry is something it seems many portraitists can't resist, be that in Annie Leibovitz's glossy, moody, sumptuous series from 2007 or Julian Calder's Queen of Scots, Sovereign of the Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle and Chief of the Chiefs (2010). That's another out-there fairytale look, the Queen standing in the midst of Scottish heather in a huge emerald velvet cloak, staring fiercely off into the distance. It is fabulously dramatic, and could be a still from Game of Thrones – but it is the opposite of humanising.

Even Lucian Freud's divisive 2001 portrait, a typically fleshy, squashy thing, has the Queen firmly in a tiara. The painting was widely criticised in the press, The Sun opting for the headline "It's a Travesty Your Majesty", while Robert Simon, editor of the British Art Journal, offered the deathless assessment that "it makes her look like one of the royal corgis who has suffered a stroke". For Adrian Searle, The Guardian’s art critic, however, it was the best royal portrait for "at least 150 years". He wrote that "portraiture is supposed to get beneath the skin; Freud has got beneath the powder, and that itself is no mean feat". Even in praise, there was a recognition that probably our then greatest living painter could only get beneath the monarch's make-up – not actually to what was on the inside.

To my mind, the two pictures that get closest to hinting at an interior life have one very unusual thing in common: the Queen has her eyes shut. Chris Levine's 2004 holographic portraits show the usual pomp and poise – but it is an image caught between formal shots, eyes closed, that arrests the viewer. It's genuinely beautiful, utterly radiant, but it also carries a rare sense of authenticity: here is the private Queen, one who momentarily has gone inwards. "I wanted the Queen to feel peaceful, so I asked her to rest between shots; this was a moment of stillness that just happened," Levine told The Guardian in 2009. "This picture takes us into the Queen's mind, her inner realm."

The other is not a formal portrait, but still notable nonetheless: Mark Stewart's photograph, The Queen Crying at the Field of Remembrance, Westminster Abbey from 2002. It captures a rare instance of the Queen showing vulnerability and emotion, during a ceremony previously always carried out by her mother, in the year after she died. Yet even this image reveals an attempt to retain control, surely, via the act of her shutting her eyes. It is striking that even in the two images that feel most "real", the viewer is still not allowed full access. If eyes are the window to the soul, the Queen has drawn the curtains.

Queen and country

The tight control of the Queen's official image has resulted in its own interesting side effect. The Queen doesn't seem like a real person to us: she has become, instead, a symbol. A highly codified image, instantly recognisable. Portraits of her might fail to show a human being – instead (and you suspect this may be exactly what she's hoping for) they turn her into a pure icon. And artists love icons. Many of the most recognisable images of the Queen are not polite portraits – but rather works that use her image in subversive, witty, or irreverent ways. This only works if an image is well-known enough to riff on, of course – and Her Majesty certainly is. Having that neat little image on millions of stamps and coins for 70 years obviously hasn't hurt; her profile is apparently so identifiable that British stamps are the only ones in the world that don't need their country of origin spelled out.

But this has also allowed the Queen's image to symbolise all sorts of contradictory things: a visual shorthand that can be used either to celebrate or critique Royalty, privilege, power; Britishness or Englishness or empire; tradition, endurance, the stiff-upper-lip… but also a certain kitsch, camp, or bling. Artists use her to say whatever it is they want to say, or as a rich canvas for their style, their aesthetic; they do not to try to accurately represent her as a person. As such, a history of unauthorised images of the Queen offers almost a crash-course in various trends of contemporary art.

Think of Andy Warhol giving Elizabeth II the silk-screen, colourful Pop Art treatment in 1985, proving she's as iconic as Marilyn Monroe, Chairman Mao and Campbell's Soup. Or Jamie Reid's infamous 1977 collages where Liz goes punk, a safety pin through her lip, indelibly associated with the Sex Pistols' anti-monarchist God Save the Queen.