The Ultimate Book of Royal Portraits: Volume Two: A Kindle Coffee Table Book

HUNDREDS OF DAZZLING ROYAL PORTRAITS AT YOUR FINGERTIPS!
This 3-volume series of royal portraits includes 560 digitally enhanced portraits of (mostly) European royalty from the 15th century through the 19th century. The portraits have been grouped according to the royal house to which the subjects belonged. In some cases, subjects from affiliated houses have been included within the main house. Each portrait includes some basic biographical information, presented on the page immediately preceding the portrait. Keep in mind that this is primarily an art book, not a history book. All the portraits have been selected based solely on their artistic merit. It will be left to others to provide a comprehensive history of the royals.

Royal portraiture has been around for centuries and has always been one of the perks of being rich and famous. The lowly peasants of the world were certainly not able to afford to have a world-renowned painter create a lavish portrait that presented them in their very best light.

It was the ancient Egyptians who first began to create portraits as a stylized profile. That sort of portraiture continued through the Greek and Roman periods. Around the 1500s, however, that begins to change. The subject of the portrait begins to turn to face the viewer. We see more of the person’s face and body as well as surrounding objects, and as you’ll see from the portraits in this book, we see what they are wearing - the lavish, extravagant and gorgeous clothes and costumes that let the viewer know that this is a very special and very important person. But most importantly, perhaps, is the way that their eyes meet those of the viewer. It is their eyes that really draw you into the portrait and allow you to make a connection with a person from a time and place far removed from your 21st-century life.

It was the Stuart royal family (1603-1714) who first began to understand the importance of the royal portrait as a way to promote their reign and their policies. Their reign coincided with the explosion of a print culture that allowed them to cheaply reproduce their portrait images in pamphlets that could be distributed among the public as a way to promote and brand the monarchy. The portraits could also be found hanging on the walls of palaces, government buildings and in the homes of the aristocracy.

Most of the portraits in this book have a certain photorealistic quality to them, although in many cases, it was not necessarily considered important to have an authentic likeness. It was often more important that the portrait show a version of how the royal person wished to be seen; a kind of early photoshopping. The royal would often demand that the painter present him in the most flattering light which would, in many cases, severely limit the painter’s ability to express his creativity. In some cases, it was nearly impossible to create a flattering portrait because generations of inbreeding had created deformities in many of the family members. The most famous example of this phenomenon was the “Habsburg jaw,” a protruding jaw shared by many members of the House of Habsburg, which is evident in some of the portraits in this book.

Occasionally a painter would sabotage the royal person by painting him or her in an unflattering light in order to make a political statement. The Spanish painter Francisco Goya was known to have deliberately painted some of his royal subjects as, shall we say, less than beautiful in order to express his contempt for how common folk were treated by the royals. This may have limited his ability to find work as a royal portraitist.