Artists impose own likeness on royal portraits
Computer-aided comparisons of a series of paintings of British monarchs and the self-portraits by the artists show that the painters often imposed their own features onto the famous person.
Art historian Simon Abrahams, who studied hundreds of paintings, wrote on his blog ArtScholar.org that the practice, which he called"face fusion", revealed a hidden agenda.
He said:"These royal images were never intended by the artist as historical records of an actual sitter, but as depictions of the artist's alter ego. No doubt they pretended otherwise to their patrons but they, and their peers, knew better; the evidence is overwhelming."
The similarities were revealed when Mr Abrahams used computers to line up the portrait of the royal from the same angle as a self-portrait of the painter.
He then stripped away extra details - which he claimed the artists regularly used to hide their guile - to reveal the faces and their similarities.
He said that"face fusion" dated as far back as the 1600s in the work of Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver, who both painted Queen Elizabeth I, but was even present in the portrait of the current Queen by Lucian Freud.