At first glance, it looks like a photograph shrunk to miniature proportions. A portrait of the King surrounded by diamonds is mounted within an oval frame to make the Royal Family Order of Charles III, the award given by the monarch to senior women in the royal family.
The 4cm x 3cm image, however, was not generated by a camera or a computer, it is the result of 100 hours of painstaking work by the artist Elizabeth Meek, who captured Charles’s likeness using a powerful magnifying glass and tiny paintbrushes dipped in turpentine to thin the paint.
Meek painted a portrait of the King, when he was the Prince of Wales, at Highgrove in 2005 and has been awarded the MBE.
Elizabeth Meek worked from morning to night for four weeks to complete the portrait
ANDREW HASSON FOR THE TIMES
When she stepped down from her role as president of the Royal Society of Miniature Painters, Sculptors and Gravers in 2013, Charles, the patron of the society, praised her “determination to retain the tradition of this art form, which has been historically significant since the reign of Henry VIII”.
When the King commissioned a portrait for his new family order after acceding the throne in 2022, there was one obvious candidate.
“He has got a memory like an elephant,” Meek, 72, said of Charles. She was contacted by an aide, who asked whether she would do the portrait, and if it could be completed for the state visit of the emperor and empress of Japan in June last year.
The Queen, the King, President Macron and his wife, Brigitte, at the Élysée Palace in 2023
CHRISTIAN LIEWIG/CORBIS/GETTY IMAGES
Meek added: “He said, ‘I don’t want to put you under any pressure, but how long do you think it’ll take you?’ And I did get it done in time. I did it in four weeks. My husband insisted I took a day off a week because I worked every day from morning till night. It was really stressful.”
While Meek had worked on miniatures before, she had never tackled a portrait so small. “I drew it first very accurately with pencil,” she said. “And I had to make sure I placed each medal, because there were rather a lot of them, exactly, because if I got one wrong, the whole lot would go wrong.”
The order created for King Charles III’s reign is painted on the synthetic material polymin and shows the King wearing the uniform of the admiral of the fleet. It is pinned to the left shoulder of senior women in the royal family at formal occasions.
The tradition dates from more than 200 years ago, when George IV began the formal process of presenting family orders as a way of acknowledging service to the crown.
Meek’s accomplishment is all the more extraordinary given that her skills are self-taught. She took up drawing, she said, to escape her “very difficult” home life as a child. “I was born into the Plymouth Brethren, which I’m not in now, but my father was a very violent man,” she said. “A lot of my childhood, I just used to sit and draw. It was a little world I went into to escape.”
Meek started painting miniatures after finding a book on the subject and thinking “I could do that”
ANDREW HASSON FOR THE TIMES
She trained as a nurse but kept drawing as a hobby. One day, she spotted a guide to miniatures in a charity shop for £5. “I thought, well, that would look terribly intelligent on my coffee table,” she said. “And when I got home, I was flicking through it and I thought, do you know, I could do that. I’m going to have a go.”
Within a few months, she was submitting her work to the Royal Society of Miniature Painters, Sculptors and Gravers. Awards and recognition followed and she has now been a miniature portrait artist for more than 40 years.
Meek initially resisted her calling and trained as a nurse, but painted in her spare time
ANDREW HASSON FOR THE TIMES
On Tuesday, her work will be worn by senior female members of the royal family when they host President Macron and his wife, Brigitte, at Windsor Castle for a state banquet.
She said: “Charles is concerned to keep these sorts of traditional skills going. We want to encourage the younger people, even if it’s sort of different, so it’s not just all old people like me.”
Meek’s portrait miniatures will be included in the annual exhibition of the society from November 18 to 22 at the Bankside Gallery, London.