The King displays his artistic talent in this smart new exhibition

Telegraph

30-06-2025

Gulp! Sometimes, as an art critic, you need to be severe. But what if the thing you're scrutinising isn't by a professional artist but by the King?
Highgrove from the Thyme Walk (2000) is a pencil drawing by His Majesty King Charles III, and one of more than 50 exhibits in The Power of Drawing, a smart new show marking the 25th anniversary of the Royal Drawing School in east London, which he helped to found. Displayed a few sheets down from drawings by Antony Gormley and Tracey Emin, it appears on the other side of a large window from a pair of charcoal landscapes by David Hockney. Exalted company, indeed.
Does it hold its own? At risk of sounding like a toady, it kind of does. An annotated study of the tonal values of a gentle vista (looking back, across the garden, towards his Gloucestershire home), it's animated, in the foreground, by swift, frisky strokes denoting low shrubbery or flowers. Mostly, though, His Majesty seems preoccupied in this drawing (on which he worked when he was still the Prince of Wales) with the dark, stark structure of an imposing tree that semi-obscures the Georgian building behind. Deploying arrows, he records various details: a 'v. dark trunk', 'dark foliage' in places, 'light green' leaves.
With blotches along two edges of pale blue and yellow watercolour, it's evidently a working drawing for a painting – and a demonstration of his belief that close observational drawing is 'one of the most direct ways of engaging with the world'. Even the bespectacled student beside me, copying Gormley's image of a silhouetted figure seemingly with Popeye's forearms, raises an eyebrow upon discovering the identity of the draughtsman responsible for this Highgrove sketch: 'It's actually pretty skilled,' he smiles.
Charles's drawing will attract attention, but it shouldn't drown out the wider merits of this engaging show, which assembles drawings by 25 alumni and 25 'creatives', including Tim Burton, the American filmmaker, the Canadian-American singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright, and the British illustrator Quentin Blake (who contributes a characteristically loose and playful doodle of a man conversing with a stork). The architect Norman Foster is represented, like the King, by an annotated sketch – in his case, from 1959, depicting the interior of a chapel by Le Corbusier in eastern France. Apple's former chief design officer Jony Ive displays two impressive efforts executed when he was only 14 years old, including a sleekly precise 'observational drawing' of a Pyrex measuring jug.
Above all, the exhibition – which reflects drawing's astonishing variety (Cornelia Parker even presents a 'drawing' magicked out of wire made from melted-down lead bullets) – reveals how much has changed since the school opened in a former warehouse at the turn of the millennium. In those days, the heyday of the Young British Artists, conceptualism was still rampant. Life studios were closing, and traditional methods were under threat.
Yet, the list of alumni participating in this show boasts several names with considerable cachet now (Somaya Critchlow, Christina Kimeze, Jake Grewal), as figuration – often of a fantastical bent, fathoming internal (i.e., psychological and emotional) subjects, as much as documenting external views – has returned to vogue.