Charles becomes sovereign of the United Kingdom and Canada this week, but the Prince of Wales has long been an artist king.
He was introduced to brushes as a teenager by the painter Robert Waddell at the boarding school in Gordonstoun, Scotland. Balmoral Castle and its harsh Scottish landscapes remain a privileged source of inspiration for this self-described “enthusiastic amateur” royal.
His first watercolors were exhibited at Windsor Castle in 1977 along with those of equally happy-handed Queen Victoria. Charles prefers this painting to water on paper because the speed of execution required does not keep his security service waiting too long behind the easel.
His works sold for a small fortune, which therefore also made the new king an aristocrat of artists in Great Britain. The two-decade sales alone (1997-2016) brought in around $3.5 million. All profits are donated to the Prince of Wales’s Charitable Fund, a philanthropic enterprise active in education, the environment and the preservation of heritage.
Charles’ personal fortune was recently estimated at over $3 billion by The Guardian. It includes a collection of stamps worth 100 million pounds.
As sovereign, he becomes the owner of the collection of works of art of the British royal family, one of the largest in the world, all museums combined. There are more than 7,000 canvases, some 150,000 engravings, around 40,000 watercolors and hundreds of thousands of other works of art, tapestries, ceramics and books.
A feudal Disneyland
His real and indeed passionate interest in arts and culture came not from his mother, but from his grandmother who purchased hundreds of high quality works when prices were flat in the 1930s , 40s and 50s. The Queen Mother had filled Clarence House with them before Charles and Camilla moved there twenty years ago.
Elizabeth II was above all associated culturally with the Royal Variety Performances, as with certain film premieres. His real passion was for racehorses and car mechanics, a trade learned during the war.
His eldest son has a strong crush on architecture and heritage. He affirms his tastes in several books, including A Vision of Britain (1989) and The Prince’s Foundationwhich teaches and promotes pre-modern styles and urban planning.
“We need to reconnect with those traditional approaches and techniques honed over thousands of years, considered old-fashioned and useless only since the 20th century.e century, with the progressive modern era,” the Prince of Wales wrote in The Architectural Review in 2014. The remark could serve as a watchword for him to protect the regime that now makes him king.
His clear-cut ideas, against the grain, have led to concrete achievements. Charles acquired Highgrove House in Gloucestershire in 1980 and completely renovated it to its old-fashioned taste, including the gardens which are visited by 30,000 people a year.
He also presided over the construction of the experimental complex at Poundbury, in the south of England, in a neo-Georgian and neo-Victorian style. The 3500 occupants of the houses cannot change the color of the pastel facades without the agreement of His Royal Highness. The critic of Guardian described this miniature stronghold as a “feudal Disneyland”…
A monstrous boil
He himself does not hesitate to fiercely criticize certain contemporary projects. He assumes an immoderate hatred of the brutalist style. Already in 1984, he spoke of the new National Gallery in London as a “monstrous boil” (monstrous carbuncle). He saw Birmingham city center as an ugly maze of concrete and presented his library as something like “a place where books would be burned rather than kept”. His opinions carried enough weight to abort the construction of several projects, including a tower in London designed by none other than Mies van der Rohe, excuse me.
The enlightened patron greatly supported the initiation to the arts and the preservation of ancestral craft techniques. Another of his foundations, Children&the Arts, dating from 2006, has already enabled more than half a million British children to take part in cultural outings. Yet another, The Turquoise Mountain Trust, created in 2006, notably supports craftsmanship in Afghanistan. This patronage has made it possible to train approximately 15,000 workers and craftsmen, to launch around fifty businesses and to restore 150 historic buildings in the country.
The most cynical will see it as a way to replenish sympathy. The most realistic remember that The Prince’s Foundation has had its share of controversy for having accepted donations supposedly in exchange for titles (“cash-for-honours”).
The king enthroned on Saturday replies that his cultural activism is part of a vision, a philosophy that makes arts and culture “a means of concretely transforming life”. This imposing and multifaceted philanthropy was the subject of an online exhibition by the Google Arts&Culture service.