King Charles III’s Portrait Study Joins Buckingham Palace’s Expanded Picture Gallery
Buckingham Palace has added a new point of interest for visitors: a large oil study for Jonathan Yeo’s portrait of King Charles III is now on view in the Silk Tapestry Room, just off the Picture Gallery. The Royal Collection recently accepted the work as a gift, placing it within one of the palace’s most visible semi-public spaces at the same moment that the gallery itself has been substantially reinstalled.
The Picture Gallery now displays 120 paintings, nearly double the 63 previously on view. Along with the expanded hanging, the room has been updated with green silk damask wall coverings and new lighting, a change that alters both the atmosphere and the way the collection reads in space. The gallery still includes Old Master paintings by Titian, Vermeer, and Caravaggio, but the new arrangement gives the room a denser, more ceremonial feel.
The study is likely to draw particular attention because it relates to Yeo’s widely discussed first official portrait of the King, unveiled a year after Charles’s coronation in May 2023. The finished painting shows Charles frontally in a Welsh Guards uniform, hands clasped over a sword, with a butterfly hovering near his right shoulder. In the study, the same pose is present, but the background is more open and painterly, with swaths of pink, orange, and violet rather than the deeper red field of the final work.
Yeo has painted a range of public figures and cultural names, including Malala Yousafzai, Sir David Attenborough, and Damien Hirst. The portrait was commissioned by the Drapers Company when Charles was still the Prince of Wales, and the first of four sittings took place in 2021. The finished painting remains on permanent view at Drapers’ Hall, a few miles east of its new companion study at Buckingham Palace.
For Buckingham Palace, the addition does more than satisfy curiosity around a controversial portrait. It also folds a recent chapter of royal image-making into a gallery that is being presented with greater scale, polish, and historical breadth.
