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This week, Getty Images said that a photograph of Queen Elizabeth II surrounded The photograph taken by her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, supposedly taken by Catherine at Balmoral Castle in 2022, had been “digitally enhanced at source”. Among the rarities reported by the British media There was an apparent misalignment of the queen’s tartan skirt and signs that Prince Louis may have been moved further back.
Kensington Palace declined to comment, but last week, after photo agencies retracted a photograph they had distributed of Catherine and her children, the princess said she had altered it.
These revelations have resonated in a particular way because Catherine has been out of the public eye while recovering from abdominal surgery, and as conspiracy theories have taken on a life of their own on social media.
But historians say that long before Photoshop, Instagram filters and iPhone editing, when the public had somewhat different expectations about the authenticity of public figures and when the media had different standards, the intense retouching of portraits of royalty and other societies was common.
Victoria was a young queen in the early days of photography, and she and her husband, Albert, embraced the new technology and even learned to make daguerreotypes in a real darkroom. After Albert’s death, when Victoria had begun a life of seclusion, she used photographs to project your grief to the world. By the time of her Diamond Jubilee, she had established the distribution of official images as a primary way for the monarch to connect with the people.
“Very soon, the images were manipulated,” said Ed Owens, a royal historian. The kinds of things that photographers do now with editing software, they did then by playing with negatives.
A retoucher’s pencil marks show how they made Victoria look as if she had never aged. In the book “Queen Victoria, first media monarch”, describes John Plunkett: “Victoria’s waist has slimmed several centimeters. …Curves have been created where they did not exist before. …Her forehead and an area of her cheek have been completely smoothed. … A series of lines on the negative darken and thicken her hair.”
Plunkett writes that occasional complaints can be found about the retouching of photographs of the queen, but these complaints also reflect a lack of surprise that retouching was routine.
In an unusual example of photographic alteration, Victoria took charge of scratch his face from a daguerreotype of 1852 portrait with his five oldest children. The Royal Collection, which owns her image, notes that she recorded in her diary: “Mine was sadly horrible, but the children’s were pretty.” She commissioned a replacement portrait.
Cecil Beaton, the master of 20th century royal photographers, was particularly skilled at enhancing photographs to make his subjects look better.
When the Victoria and Albert Museum in London mounted an exhibition of Beaton’s work in conjunction with Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee, curator Susanna Brown explained in a video: “The final images that visitors will see in the exhibition have all been highly retouched. …Beaton often advised his retouchers to slim down models’ waists or perhaps eliminate double chins. But these details were very important when building an idealized image. These are not documentary shots. They are a much more romantic style of portrait, in which no hair clashes and every detail is perfect.”
It wasn’t that different from the idealized one.”youth mask”Paintings of Queen Elizabeth I, for which the artists were tasked with conveying eternal beauty.
In his research, historian Alexis Schwarzenbach found Beaton’s instructions for a retoucher to remove wrinkles from a 1941 portrait of Prince George, Duke of Kent, who was 39 years old. “Please retouch all of this a lot. HM is not used to more than clean retouched lines,” Beaton wrote.
The resulting image accompanied many of the obituaries published following the duke’s accidental death the following year, helping to “immortalize an ever-young and handsome image of this British prince.” Schwarzenbach wrote.
Hugo Vickers, Beaton’s authorized biographer, recalled that one client objected to the extent of the alterations to his portrait: the mother of Queen Elizabeth II, widely known as the Queen Mother.
“She felt that the passing of the years had not affected her at all” and asked: “Perhaps Mr. Beaton could remove some of the touch-ups?” Vickers told the Washington Post.
A trio of images from that 1950 session, now in the Victoria and Albert archives and included in Schwarzenbach’s research, shows a photo that was overly retouched for the Queen Mother’s taste, an unedited original photo, and a third lightly retouched photo that she approved.
Vickers said it wasn’t until the 1960s that society photographers stopped removing everyone’s wrinkles and aspired to greater realism. But even now, he said, “the job of a society photographer or a royal photographer or a portrait photographer is to make people look good. Unless you’re Lucian Freud, that’s what you do.”
Although it has usually been photographers or their retouchers who altered real portraits, in some cases it has been the media.
The Illustrated London News, a beautifully illustrated weekly newspaper, did little more than light touch-ups when it endeavored to cover the news that King Edward VIII was abdicating in 1936, before his coronation. The newspaper returned to the artist it had commissioned to paint Edward for the coronation edition, and the artist painted the head of the new King George VI over Edward’s clothed figure.
“It was one of the first cases in which a real magazine portrait was retouched,” he said. Lisa BarnardCEO of Illustrated London News.
One of the first, but definitely not the last.
Marisa Bellack in Washington contributed to this report.