Prince William

American figurative artist Elizabeth Peyton does not like the term ‘portrait’. Instead she calls her works ‘pictures of people’. In these exquisite, small-scaled pictures, with their fluid brushstrokes and vibrant colours, she portrays a diverse range of subjects, from friends and lovers to historical figures, British royalty, artists and musicians. Peyton says her pictures, variously created from life and found images, are about love and admiration.

Peyton is best known for her paintings, but printmaking has played an important role in her artistic practice since the late 1990s. She says she finds the medium exciting and freeing as it offers a more reduced and active form of mark-making than she finds available in painting. 1

This lithograph in one of five in the Art Gallery’s collection that belongs to a series published by the New York Public Art Fund. They include a loving, intimate portrait of the artist Tony Just (USA b1969), Peyton’s boyfriend at the time; a picture of Prince Harry and Prince William at a family wedding in 1999; another sullen portrait of Prince William waiting for an air display to begin at RAF Wattisham, Suffolk in 1999; and two images of John F Kennedy Junior – one with his mother Jacqueline Onassis during a holiday in Greece in 1970 and another taken at a horse show in New Jersey that same year.

1. ‘The Clarice Smith Distinguished Lectures in American art: Elizabeth Peyton’, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 12 October 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=G3L3I1Tf5XU accessed 15 March 2021