Kate’s official portrait

The Duchess of Cambridge’s official portrait has been unveiled and it’s getting mixed reviews.

Kate is reportedly thrilled with it.

The public and media, uh, not so much.

“Kate Middleton’s first portrait has a creepy Dorian Gray quality to it,” New York Post Page Six web producer Lorraine Chow said on Twitter.

“For the Duchess of Cambridge, however, (Paul Elmsley) has produced what looks like a piece of mawkish book illustration, a work that could be read as an almost comical pastiche of a certain kind of ‘sensitive’ painting – that might pass muster on the cover of a Catherine Cookson novel, but will hardly bear sustained scrutiny in a major art gallery,” Telegraph writer Mark Hudson wrote. “If Kim Jong un, Supreme Leader of North Korea, had a portrait painted of himself in a similar idiom, we’d all be crowing from the rafters about the pitiful taste of foreign despots.”

David Lee, former editor of Art Review magazine and founder of satirical art magazine The Jackdaw, told the Daily Mail the painting is “most bland and predictable royal portrait in living memory.”

He added: “It is perfectly adequate for the boardroom of a supermarket but entirely inadequate for a national collection.”

I’m no art critic, but to me, she looks like a 40-year-old smoker in this portrait. I want to like it, but I don’t. I think if she had a big smile, it would make a world of difference.

What do you think?

The painting was done by artist Paul Emsley and was unveiled Friday.

 

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