Kate Middleton has been a royal style and beauty icon for so long that it's easy enough to understand that no depicture of her could really ever do her justice – but this one really seems to have missed the mark. A new portrait featuring Kate is on the cover of the UK magazine Tatler, and not only is the Princess of Wales unrecognizable, but people also have a lot of opinions about it so far. After you see it, you might understand why.
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Tatler revealed the cover on Wednesday.
Kate is featured front and center on the July/August issue of the magazine, painted by artist Hannah Uzor.
"Tatler's July 2024 cover completes a royal triptych of historic magnitude with a new portrait of Her Royal Highness by British-Zambian artist @HannahUzor. ‘She has really risen up to her role,’ mother-of-three Uzor tells Helen Rosslyn, ‘She was born for this. She carries herself with such dignity, elegance and grace,'" the caption on the image reads.
The inspiration for the portrait seems to have come from one of Kate's formal looks.
Kate wore a white dress and matching cape to a state dinner held at Buckingham Palace in November 2022, when the royals welcomed the president of South Africa to the UK. The dinner marked the first that she attended as the Princess of Wales after Queen Elizabeth's death just two months earlier.
The tiara she was wearing that night — the one worn by Princess Diana at her wedding — also made it into the portrait.
People aren't hiding how they feel about the portrait.
On Tatler's Instagram post showing off the cover, commenters did not hold back when it came to how they really feel about the artwork.
"Was this done by a child?" one person bluntly asked.
Some were a bit kinder in their approach, such as the person who commented, "I really respect the artist but I also dont see Catherine here."
This is the second royal portrait to raise eyebrows this month.
Just last week, a new portrait of King Charles was unveiled, and it didn't exactly receive rave reviews, either.
"That is absolutely shocking! Our Princess of Wales is absolutely stunning in every way and this looks absolutely nothing like her!" one person tweeted on X. "First we have our beloved King Charles slathered in red paint now this unrecognisable person! It's just horrible!"
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The artist explained her take in an interview with the magazine.
Because Kate is still not taking on any public-facing duties as she is going through chemo following her cancer diagnosis earlier this year, Uzor wasn't able to have the Princess of Wales sit for the portrait, which she said caused her to approach the work a bit differently.
“When you can’t meet the sitter in person, you have to look at everything you can find and piece together the subtle human moments revealed in different photographs: do they have a particular way of standing or holding their head or hands? Do they have a recurrent gesture?’” she told Tatler. "All my portraits are made up of layers of a personality, constructed from everything I can find about them."
