Jonathan Yeo paints people as they are, not as they would like to be seen, and the powerful keep asking him to do so. He looks for the real person under the public face, the flicker of character a photograph is trained to smooth away, and that honesty is why the famous trust him with it.
Remarkably, he is self-taught, having taken up painting seriously while recovering from illness in his twenties. He works in oil, stripping back detail so that everything gathers in the face and hands, and builds a likeness slowly until it is the character, rather than the surface, that you notice.
His 2024 portrait of King Charles III, unveiled at Buckingham Palace, became one of the most talked-about British paintings in years. His other models include Sir David Attenborough, Malala Yousafzai, Nicole Kidman, Idris Elba, Tony Blair and Damien Hirst, and his work has been the subject of major retrospectives in Britain and abroad.
