“Andrew’s terrified eyes echo the scream”: Is the arrest portrait the definitive royal portrait? | UK News

THey he says the camera adds 10 pounds. Does it also add a sudden, terrifying understanding of the abject horror of existence? Phil Noble clearly does. A Reuters photographer’s shot of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor leaving Aylsham Police Station in the back of his Range Rover is an image of shock, pain and horror. Noble’s harsh, blinding flash paints Andrew pink, red, and white—his skin is diseased, his eyes hollow and red like rats. His hands are lowered as if in prayer, as if he is begging a higher power to forgive him.

Much like the eerily similar photo of his father, Prince Philip, in a car in 2019, the creation of this photo is a combination of pure luck. Noble took the shots as Mountbatten and Windsor rallied. Two were blank, two were police, and one was out of focus. Only this one came out right. This alone gave us a special glimpse of the power crumbling and rotting in real time.

In the age of social media and cameras, it’s more difficult than ever for a single photo to stand out and rise above the visual noise we’re exposed to. What this person did in some way shows how important and powerful he is. Whatever the precise crimes Mountbatten-Windsor may or may not have committed, Noble has captured in one incredibly serendipitous image the profound pain of having to live with what she did and deal with its repercussions.

It’s the eyes that do it. They pull you into the abyss of the picture: Mountbatten-Windsor, terrified and dazed, frozen in wide-eyed dismay and distress. Those red eyes, like two little portals to hell, are not angry or evil: they are dazed and exhausted. They are the same eyes you see in the agonizing howl in Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” or in Gustave Courbet’s “Desperate Man.”

The same eyes you see again and again in Otto Dix das Krieg’s series of engravings, where terrified faces glow from the paper completely unable to comprehend the horrors they witnessed on the dank battlefields of the First World War. The characters in Dix’s work are victims, witnesses to trauma, and people forever scarred by what they have just survived.

But what viewers – Rightly or wrongly – What you read in this picture is not the loss of innocence or the trauma of the victim. It is guilt and complicity. Something much closer to Francis Bacon’s The Screaming Pope series, which depicts a powerful ecclesiastical figure consumed by the pain of his past.

Or perhaps better yet, Francisco de Goya’s Gothic nightmare, Saturn Devours His Son, a dark vision of a Titan driven to eat his own child because the goddess Gaia prophesied that one of his sons would overthrow him. Here, the wide-eyed bewilderment of the central character speaks of a personal horror, a recognition that things are done, and can never be undone.

It’s a long way from how kings are depicted in history. All the gold, pomp and circumstance has been replaced with the opulence of the end of the empire, the immaculate luxury of the all-white leather interior of a Range Rover, and the mortal shame of being the first senior royal to be arrested in modern history.

Images of rulers are controlled, approved and mediated by the rulers themselves. Royals, tyrants and tyrants do not allow any old image into wider society. But this is not formal, nor is it achieved through an intermediary, but rather a window into a private moment. Royal families around the world must be furious that someone would invent telephoto lenses.

Important royal portraits record a small handful of historical facts rather than a broader, more accurate narrative. Most of us know absolutely nothing about Charles II of Spain, but one look at his massive jaw in the 17th century portrait of him by Juan Carreño de Miranda triggers immediate thoughts about inbreeding and how it was a tool of control, greed and empire. This photo will tell a similar story in the future. The British royal family will forever be linked to the Epstein files and all the grim truths they revealed.

Will this be their legacy? Will this be how history remembers the royals in the early 2000s? Not as gilded icons, or powerful, adorned leaders standing proud with chests covered in military medals like ancient royals – but as decaying, broken ghosts haunting a decaying, broken nation.