Artist hails ‘great honour’ of accompanying King Charles on Caribbean visit

Artist Jonathan Yeo has described the commission of joining King Charles on his Caribbean trip as official tour artist as an “honour”.

The celebrated portrait artist is being a striking painting of King Charles, which took two years to complete, unveiled in 2024.

Yeo’s work painting images of prominent figures, from the late Duke of Edinburgh to Sir Idris Elba and former Prime Minister Sir Tony Blair, have earned him critical acclaim.

The artist is now tasked with developing a concept for a series of images for the King, and unveil the finished works in the months to come.

The King is midway through his tour having completed a trip to the Bahamas and a two-day state visit to Guyana before flying to Antigua and Barbuda for a Commonwealth leaders’ summit.

The artist said: “It’s a great honour and lovely to be asked. At the same time whenever you’re stepping a bit out of your comfort zone, it’s a funny thing it’s a bit of pressure because you don’t quite know exactly what the end results are going to be.”

The King, a keen watercolourist, has commissioned and privately funded artists to paint impressions of his foreign trips for decades, giving them free rein to create artworks that reflect the visits, and they are not obliged to feature images of Charles.

The painter said: “I haven’t seen him do sketching, I don’t know if he gets much time for it these days, but I think the idea is we have a debrief at the end of the trip and have a chat about what I’m planning to do.”

The artist has brought sketchbooks to capture scenes but has also been taking photographs to aid his work.

He joked about owning shirts but no ties ahead of the trip which traditionally sees Charles wearing his stable wardrobe of shirt, suit and tie unless in extreme weather conditions.

The publicity around Yeo’s striking larger than life-size portrait of the King, emerging from a red background, has created a “bigger international audience” for his work, the artist said.

Yeo was able to get to know the King during the four sittings he held with Charles, the first in June 2021 at Highgrove when he was the Prince and Wales and by the final meeting in November 2023 at Clarence House, Charles was monarch.

The painter said: “I’d met him before so I didn’t feel I had to explain the work very much being a painter himself, and he’s very interested in the arts, he set up the Royal Drawing School to champion traditional techniques when it was out of fashion.”

Asked if he noticed a change in Charles when he became King, he replied: “He obviously became the King and I felt he had sort of, you know, he was maybe sort of standing a bit differently.

“There was a slight difference in energy that might have been my expectations or the way other people were reacting to him.”