BY TRACY JO SMITH
CELEBRATED Catholic portrait printer Michael Noakes is to display his artistic interpretation of the Queen's Golden Jubilee.
Among the works capturing the pomp and the pageantry of the Jubilee year celebrations will be a collection of drawings and paintings depicting everything from the dignity and grandeur of the Queen Mother's Lying-inState to sketches showing the gilded magnificence of the Gold Coach bearing the Queen to St Paul's. Mr Noakes said: "Obviously, I'm no stranger to painting Royalty, having painted the Queen on several occasions over the past thirty years, as well as many other members, including Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, the Prince of Wales, the Princess Royal and I produced the only official portrait of the Duke and Duchess of York.
"Studies for several of these portraits will hang also in the exhibition, making it an event of considerable significance during this historic Royal year".
The exhibition will be held at the Mall Galleries, just a few hundred yards from Buckingham Palace.
In collaboration with his wife, the writer, Vivien Noakes, he has produced a unique chronicle entitled Royal Year in the Daily Life of the Queen:An Artist's Diary. The book marked the first time such access had been permitted to the Monarch's working life throughout an entire year and contained many of the drawings and paintings which will be on view in the exhibition.
Apart from Royalty, Michael Noakes, a former pupil of Downside, has painted Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, actors such as Robert Morley, Margaret Rutherford and Ralph Richardson and clerics including Archbishop Robert Runcie, the late Cardinal Basil Hume, as well as leading academics, business executives, legal figures, and of course, families and children.
Many of his works are on public display; he is represented in numerous collections, and is the only painter to have received a platinum disc for his album cover, "Portait of Sinatra".