Duchess of Cambridge

Instead of a portrait, Emsley has produced an overblown mug shot. All mug shots are unflattering because they have nothing to do with the human soul’s depths. Kate Middleton is more than the sum of her facial attributes glacially rendered by an uninspired technician’s cold hand.

Art’s spirit must always have priority over vapid displays of forensic draftsmanship, however impressive these may be to our world of crass sensationalism.

Official portraitists should look to the Grand Siècle for inspiration because French painters of the time still believed in the human soul’s existence and immortality. Today’s atheist-materialists reduce human beings to a genetic compound, brute molecular matter and nothing more. Emsley’s portrait is just that: a brutality. In this sense, it mirrors our dismal age far more than it reflects his royal subject.

Compare Emsley’s disaster to Maurice Quentin de La Tour’s Portrait of Madame de Pompadour, completed in 1754 and currently in the Louvre. The subject is one of Louis XV’s favorites, a woman who greatly influenced Europe’s artistic and intellectual life. The medium is one of the most difficult: pastel on blue paper with gouache highlights. Once the pigment is placed, there is no turning back. On a table is a perfect still life signed by the Latin phrase Delatour, Pompadour sculpsit“€”an allusion to Pompadour’s love of engraving.

The Marquise carefully dictated to her official portraitist an entire literary, artistic, and intellectual program, a kind of visual proposal to her intimate friend Louis XV, who had little patience for pseudo-philosophers. The Marquise de Pompadour wanted the world to be as intellectually engaged in the cultivation of human arts and letters as she was. All the arts, from music to painting, are beautifully represented in La Tour’s singular masterpiece of unrivaled sumptuousness.

But even more than all these adroit signifiers of Madame de Pompadour’s essential nature, La Tour immortalized her personality through the breathtaking insouciance of the left foot crossed ever so casually over the right, almost revealing a forbidden ankle as the toes play with the idea of dropping the white slipper altogether.

Though she was a stunning international beauty, the Marquise did not especially care if La Tour emphasized her looks. The face is the least directed of the portrait’s elements. Women of true quality only care about the mind.

Not so with modernity’s carnal apostates. Paul Emsley can give us only photographic flesh, a surface with nothing behind it but modernism’s contempt and scorn for life.