Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, by Stuart Pearson Wright
Through the years, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh has not been the most… liked monarch. It could be argued that the royals of today are under more scrutiny than ever due to the debated necessity of their roles entirely. They’re basically symbolic figureheads at this point. But they also have a harder time winning public opinion due to social media, news media, and television. His character depiction in The Crown was not particularly flattering. Pairing those factors along with the circulating rumors of his involvement in particularly unsavory crimes – it’s no wonder he was bound to rack up a bad portrait. In 2004 Stuart Pearson Wright was given the green light by Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, to do his royal portrait. The Duke declined an invitation to model at the artist’s studio, an old sausage factory in east London. Instead, he insisted that Stuart came to Buckingham palace for four one-hour sessions.
The title of the resulting work is Homo sapiens, Lepidium sativum and Calliphora vomitoria, which is essentially a pretentious Latin translation of “a wise man, some cress, and a bluebottle”. It does exactly what it says on the tin. The bluebottle might seem completely random, and to a large extent it is. But it does derive from the Vanitas tradition in art, which interpolates a worm-eaten apple or falling rose or something similar to tie us to nature and remind us that all flesh is grass. The cress, according to the artist, is a reference to the Prince as seed-bearer to the royal family (good luck trying to get that image out of your head). And then there’s the chest hair. No, it’s not Philip’s torso. It belongs to an anonymous, elderly gentleman who lives in London’s Bethnal Green. Apparently, he was rather startled that his chest had ended up superimposed on the Duke of Edinburgh, but also quite flattered.