Tatler’s Princess of Wales portrait is intolerably bad

Sorry, who is she meant to be? The Princess of Wales? You could have fooled me. Even by the standards of modern royal portraiture (and there have been many abominable likenesses of senior members of our royal family produced over the past century), Tatler’s new cover image – an “exclusive” portrait of the Princess of Wales by the British-Zambian artist Hannah Uzor – is egregiously, intolerably, jaw-hits-the-floor bad.

Whatever you made of Jonathan Yeo’s recently unveiled crimson portrait of King Charles III – which, as various wags observed, looked as if it had come pre-attacked with tomato soup by Just Stop Oil protesters – at least the damn thing resembled its subject.

But this? I’ve spent the past hour or so – time, incidentally, that I will never get back – scrutinising Uzor’s “likeness”, and, still, I cannot divine any flicker of resemblance between it and the woman it’s supposed to depict. At first, my editor thought it was meant to represent Meghan, Duchess of Sussex; its subject’s smirk made me think, initially, of Anne Robinson fronting The Weakest Link.

Has there been a flatter, more lifeless royal portrait in living memory? (It’s no surprise to learn that Uzor based her picture on video footage of, rather than personal sittings with, her subject.) Beneath a Lego-like helmet of unmodulated, monotonously brown “hair”, this Princess of Wales has as much charisma as a naff figurine atop a wedding cake.

She holds herself with the bored bearing of an air stewardess about to begin an in-flight safety demonstration – which is additionally awkward, given that this was a job once performed by Catherine’s mother (a fact that, in years gone by, reportedly attracted the ridicule of William’s snobbish friends).

Even her outfit (which she wore to the King’s first state banquet) appears stiff, with that rigid blue sash restricting her like a seatbelt. Her tiara doesn’t sparkle and those diamond-drop earrings fail to shine; towards the image’s bottom edge, her gown seems to disintegrate into streaks of brittle wax, like something desiccated and shrivelled worn by Miss Havisham.

In an accompanying video (in which, incidentally, Uzor appears to work on the painting while dressed, impractically, in haute couture), the artist utters clichés about, for instance, the eyes in a portrait being “the window to the soul”; yet, the notion that this likeness even hints at complex emotional and psychological depths is ridiculous.

The only aspect of Catherine that, if you were being charitable, you might say Uzor has captured is an inanimate attribute: her oval sapphire engagement ring, which once belonged to her husband’s mother. And that’s only because its shape is so distinctive, and therefore easy to replicate.

There are artists who, somehow, can make a virtue of painting people as cardboard cut-outs: the American Alex Katz, for instance, whose effervescent, depthless images of stylish bohemians and poets are typically blessed with a fashion-plate’s flair. But Uzor – who, I read with incredulity, studied recently at the Slade – has somehow transformed one of the most alluring women in the world into a cipher, an automaton, an icon of anti-glamour. She says that her portrait is meant to convey strength and dignity, but the figure she’s painted has a feeble, blow-away presence, drained of charm. Oh dear!