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A new portrait of Kate, the Princess of Wales, is drawing mixed reactions online, just one week after a portrait of her father-in-law, King Charles III, faced a similar response.
The portrait of Kate Middleton, the wife of Charles’ eldest son, Prince William, was commissioned by Tatler magazine as part of a series of portraits of members of Britain’s royal family. The portrait was unveiled Wednesday as the magazine’s cover.
The magazine said the portrait was inspired by Kate’s appearance in November 2022 at the first state banquet of Charles’ reign, to which she wore a Jenny Packham gown, a bracelet belonging to the late Queen Elizabeth II, and drop earrings that belonged to the late Princess Diana.
Kate did not sit for the portrait of herself. Instead, the artist behind it, Hannah Uzor, a British-Zambian artist, sifted through over 189,000 photos of Kate to “capture her likeness,” according to Tatler.
Describing her artistic process, Uzor said she tried to capture the “soul” of Kate in the painting.
“It’s really important to capture the soul of the person, so I spent a lot of time looking at her and looking at her pictures, watching videos of her, seeing her with her family, seeing her in diplomatic visits, seeing her rowing or visiting children in a hospice,” Uzor said in a video shared by Tatler on Instagram. “It has been really interesting for me to get a sense of who she is.”
Uzor said she went through multiple sketches to correctly capture Kate’s expression and chose to paint her in the Jenny Packham gown because it was “physically striking.”
Uzor’s work, though, received mixed reactions online, with many commenters arguing the portrait does not look like Kate, who has been out of the public eye since January, when she underwent surgery and later learned she had cancer.