“My Queens” is an evolving body of studies and original paintings

Across paintings made over a number of years, Tobias Keene returns to the figure of the queen as both a woman and a carefully constructed public image. Most of the works are studies after existing photographs or royal portraits, including Chris Levine’s Lightness of Being of 2004 and Cecil Beaton’s Coronation portrait of 1953 and portrait of Elizabeth II on Princess Margaret’s wedding day in 1960.

Keene does not simply reproduce these sources. Through changes in scale, colour, cropping, setting and the material presence of oil paint, he redirects attention from ceremonial likeness towards the psychological tension between the woman and the role she occupies.

Elizabeth II appears repeatedly and at different stages of life: newly crowned, formally posed, caught beneath an umbrella, or momentarily withdrawn with her eyes closed. Crowns, pearls, regalia, gowns and handbags identify the institution of monarchy, yet the paintings become most affecting when these symbols are placed against age, stillness, fatigue or isolation. In the umbrella painting, the enlarged shadow reads almost as a second body—the private individual standing beside the much larger public image she casts.

The young Queen Victoria is similarly held within an expansive darkness, while Elizabeth I is surrounded by theatrical splendour yet remains formidable and unsentimental. Her elaborate costume becomes almost architectural, but it does not overwhelm the ageing face at its centre.

Mary, Queen of Scots is the exception within the group: an original composition rather than a study after an identified photograph or historical portrait. Keene constructs her through heraldic pattern, costume and direct psychological presence. She therefore becomes an important counterpoint to the other works—not an inherited image being translated into paint, but a queen newly imagined.

Together, the paintings are not simply portraits of royal women. They consider how queens are dressed, staged, observed and held within images—and what remains of the individual beneath the enduring theatre of monarchy.