the royal paintbox -- privileged insights

Saw a lovely documentary on PBS, ‘The Royal Paintbox,’ hosted by the charming Prince Charles. It seems that royals since way back devoted themselves to disciplines of various sorts, the most personal and revealing being learning to paint. Victoria’s children by her own hand wore crisp colorful outfits and were proportional and recognizable. Not bad for a queen. Others in the royal line became excellent painters with the goal of “being as good as professionals,” although they didn’t need to sell of course. 

Nowhere to be seen were those ‘accidental’ watercolor skies, the opulent still-life parodies, or any self-conscious, clumsy imitation of the famous and familiar at all. Some of these guys, without regard to gender, stretched out, learned their craft and spoke from the heart. They had a chance to travel, and wanted to create their own impressions, to invest the time and effort to see and absorb exotic landscapes so that they could recapture those experiences once back in their very large houses on green and foggy estates. Their work together accurately and evocatively depicts many corners of the world.

All in all, the documentary did a lot to humanize generations of faceless polo-playing nieces and nephews, some trying to find themselves as serious people by following a discipline and devoting themselves to it -- and it wasn’t just the royals. Churchill was a painter, too, and compared making a painting to a military campaign, although he might have been slightly better at the latter. Still, I wouldn’t have said that to him. 

Here’s the point. Any person watching this program gets to judge. Were these people vacuous, empty, and absolutely ruined by wealth? Some probably were but the family, with their interest in perpetuation, expected more. Take a sketch from the program of the mountains in Kashmir, palms in the foreground and snow-caps -- what does it tell you about the self-confidence and decisiveness of the person who drew it? Quite a lot. It’s one of the qualities people admire in art, whether they recognize it in those terms or not, and the art in this documentary speaks well of the character and self-awareness of a class of very privileged people.