And it's political.

I love politics.

It's about the monarchy, though.

Still, let's check it out.

So I googled Portrait of King George to then realize that the king's name is actually Charles.

So I corrected it and found this.

So that's why it's newsworthy.

It's odd, and that's exactly why some people love it and some hate it.

In this video, I want to talk about this portrait and what it says about King George, Henry,

Richard, Charles, whatever his name is, and what it says about art.

This will be a short video, but one that will help you maybe not enjoy this painting more, but at least provide you with insights on why it is the way it is.

So royal portraits, or any portraits of people in power, when commissioned by themselves, serve to legitimize that power.

It's the most bare-bones example of propaganda.

On my money, you have a portrait of the queen.

It's used to legitimize- fuck, I don't have money.

Alright, I hope it's in focus.

See, this is my money.

This is the queen.

Alright, on my money, you have a portrait of the queen.

It's used to legitimize her power, I guess.

Showing your face to your subjects is important because you only have power over them as long as they know who you are and they recognize you as being in that position.

A royal portrait, and its distribution, is all about making the monarch recognizable and legitimate.

Legitimate.

Jonathan Yeo's portrait reveals many things, the first one being the crown's crisis of legitimacy.

The future of the royalty's legitimacy is extremely shaky.

77% of Brits over the age of 65 believe that the monarchy is good for Britain.

That's really high, so there isn't a crisis, right?

Right?

Well, for Brits between the age of 18 and 24, the woke generation as I call them, that percentage drops to 30%.

This is the first time there's a new monarch in over 70 years, and this new monarch, if he wants to keep his job and protect the power for his lineage, really needs to work to get the youth interested.

Oh, hello fellow kids.

You guys want to go look at modern art?

King Charles is cool.

He's not like the other kings with their boring portraits.

He's a new king, a 21st century king.

See, he's not about power like kings have always been, even though he has all those medals and a sword.

No, look at the pretty butterfly.

A monarch butterfly.

The monarch butterfly, as said by the artist himself, symbolizes not only Charles' transformation into a monarch lately, but also, and more importantly for the youth, his environmentalism.

Honestly, I don't know if Charles is an environmentalist or not, and honestly, I don't care much.

But they tried marketing, and there's no difference between marketing and propaganda, so they propagandized him as the green king, the environmental king.

They're literally greenwashing monarchy now.

Britain now has a carbon neutral and biodegradable king.

But the portrait is trying to appeal to the youth, not because it has a butterfly, obviously, but because it's unconventional.

It breaks with tradition.

One of the many, many reasons why the youth don't like the monarchy is because it comes off as an old, rigid, conservative, posh, stuck-up institution.

I think this is an attempt, a sad one at that, to say we can also be cool.

We're not an old institution of a different era stuck in the past.

We're still relevant.

We're still in tune with the times.

The monarchy still has its place.

All that to say, I think the painting is cool.

Not on its own.

I don't think a painting can be cool on its own, but within its context.

This is the painting of an institution of power which fears its own irrelevance and disappearance.

It's truly beautiful.

I think you have the portrait of a monarch, sort of blending in with the background, as if he was in the process of disappearing, in a way.

His uniform, his medals, his sword, they're all fading away.

The only thing remaining is the man, his face, and his hands.

That could also be an element of propaganda, of focusing on the human behind the title, by humanizing the king.

Though humanizing a king, showing that he's just a man, might just make us wonder why he's a king in the first place.

So this image of a man fading away, or at least the symbols of his power are fading away, is one which a lot of people critical of the monarchy will relate to.

The bright red, which I haven't even covered, symbolized, for a lot of people, the history of bloodshed of monarchs.

I see it as the desperate attempt at getting attention, because attention means being in the public eye, and being in the public eye means legitimacy.

That's what I had to say about the painting.

I love it.

Old autocratic institutions squirming to have you care for them as they're slowly fading away into irrelevance, revealing how power works, and how it's slowly slipping through their fingers as old people die.

This is what this painting represents.

And I love it.

And I love it.

Thank you so much for watching.

Thank you Rowan Brendel, X-Towns, Bagels, Speece, and all my other patrons for supporting the channel.

If you also want to help out, leave a like, subscribe, and check out patreon.com forward slash the canvas.

Thank you so much.