Meet the Danish Royal Family, and fear it

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I would bet a substantial sum of money that the “preliminary sketches” for that were just a bad photoshop composite from family photos.

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Don’t ruin the hauntingly frightening aspect for me. I think he painted their souls, or lack there of.

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Sure, but first he had to capture those souls with a digital camera.

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Egad. Almost as bad as the composite Signing of the Declaration of Independence painting you see in all the history textbooks, where everyone is illuminated by their own personal light source.

edit: My search-fu is weak. Anyone have information on the other artist this artist was supposed to mimic? I don’t know if it was a recent painting, or even if the subjects actually sat for it, but at least there was one definitive light source.

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That center child, his eyes, they stare right through to the back of my brain… creeeeepy.

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It really does look like the cover of a V.C. Andrews novel. Which, given the amount in inbreeding that’s gone on in Europe’s royal families, kind of makes sense, I guess.

They look alarmingly like The Sopranos.

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The Sopranos look less evil.

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Well, you could always add bicornes to everyone’s head and hang it on your wall. That might be a touch more evil.

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What about the little girl, to the left, who looks like a possessed broken doll?

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She’s Leia Atreides

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The portrait would have been more interesting if my friend Terry Rodgers had painted it in his style…

Was too distracted by the centerpiece boy boring into my brain and creating terribly dark holes in there, but yes, she is creeeeeepy too.

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Princess Isabella appears to be a sweet little tyke in real life, but the version in this painting… suddenly I am terrified by the fact that she and my daughter were born on the very same day.

My father’s father emigrated from Denmark via South American tramp steamer in the nineteen-teens, when he was fifteen years old. I’m told his father was a keeper of the king’s forest outside Copenhagen.

I was hoping to find a print of this portrait to maybe hang in my daughter’s room as a gag, but now I’m worried about awakening some centuries-old Danish family curse or something.

The artist, Thomas Kluge, is known for his rather dark portraits, so the Royal Family presumably knew what they were getting. Here is his portrait of former Danish Prime Minister (now NATO Secretary-General) Anders Fogh Rasmussen. In this case, though, the painter didn’t catch the true darkness of the subject’s soul.

Looks like they were referring to Laurtis, not Lauren Tuxen.

That makes sense, then.

Because of the era the first painting was commissioned, I propose the major difference is that Tuxen had his subjects actually “sit” for the portrait (not necessarily at the same time, but at least at similar times of day), putting in the work ethic involved in what could be considered “fine art” painting – while Kluge was lazy about it, and culled his images from bunch of photographs, not even putting in the work to try and size each family member appropriately.

There have been several essays on the more popular art blogs the past couple of years pointing out the laziness of this generation’s new “art hacks”, who can’t even be bothered to do a live sitting.

This is what happens when the Queen’s authority to order people beheaded is taken away. Oh, what a slippery slope!

Remember, DON’T look at the camera!