An Artist Who Painted Himself Into a Corner : Royal Portraitist Makes Ends Meet by Limning Americans

Richard Stone’s artistic rise was sharp, prodigious, even a little outrageous.

Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, agreed to sit for him. He was 22. That made Stone the youngest painter of royal portraits in two centuries. Behind him were commissions from conductor Sir Adrian Boult and violinist Yehudi Menuhin; ahead would be a series of Kensington Palace sittings with Princess Margaret.

Stone’s financial standing changed perceptibly.

He went from penniless to almost broke.

“It (painting the Queen Mother) was rather like winning the Oscar,” Stone explained. A chronic annoyance was clearly visible. “People thought I was colossally expensive. Suddenly you’re unapproachable. And having just painted the Queen Mother you can’t turn around and say you need work.”

$750 Payment

In fiscal truth, the Queen Mother’s portrait earned its painter a piddling, although standard, $750. Stone was left with his cheap suit (“one of those cardboard things, very stiff”) and an old bicycle that he rode to church hall lectures and $40 honorariums. He lived with his parents who fed him when he wasn’t inviting himself to dinner with supportive clients.

There has, of course, been considerable progress since that fat-lean, paradoxical, incongruous, Oscar-winning year of 1973.

Stone has now painted three portraits of the Queen Mother, two of Princess Margaret, two of the Duchess of Gloucester and one of Princess Michael of Kent. Lord mayors, American ambassadors, Cambridge dons and British prime ministers have sat for Stone.

His income has risen accordingly.

It now matches that of a good Los Angeles construction worker.

“And I’m one of, if not the most expensive portrait painter in England,” he said. “Unfortunately, the public thinks that success naturally brings great wealth. But in portrait painting it brings barely enough to get by.

‘Instantly Become Wallpaper’

“Portraits (in England) are not considered important items and (once hung) instantly become wallpaper. The aristocracy has always had its portraits painted, so there always are a lot of portrait painters around, hundreds of them in fact.”

Stone noted that the best-recognized in the business, Michael Noakes, a man who has painted Queen Elizabeth, a president of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, recently announced that he earns less than $60,000 a year.

“So those at the lower end just can’t earn a living,” Stone continued. “The majority teaches or has another form of income.”

Alternative income is precisely what has pulled the slender painter to Los Angeles. It is this, he says, or starve. And this , he explained, is total commercialization and slick transatlantic packing of self and medieval craft.

Stone, 35, is Portfolio Portraits Ltd., with telephone numbers in London, New York, Los Angeles and Palm Desert. And prices roughly 10 times what he got for his first royal portrait.

In England, Stone will continue to paint British royalty.

In the United States, he will concentrate on the kings and queen of American business and society.

“They (Americans) are proud to be successful and it shows in their life styles, the quality of those life styles, their homes, their cars and their possessions. And a portrait is a recognized display of success.

“Americans are also becoming conscious of the dynasties they are establishing . . . and they see the portrait as a significant portion of that history.”

If all of this sounds crass, opportunistic, a denial of artistic heritage, then Stone is prepared to carry the aspersion. As a matter of fact, he says, some amid the august establishment of British portraiture have already criticized his reaching towards the Colonies. In balance, however, there are portraitists who have told him they admire and envy his restless search for new ways to express their pure, narrow craftsmanship.

They certainly can find no shortfall in Stone’s apprenticeship that began, inauspiciously, with a smack in the head.

He was 4 when he fell downstairs at home, fracturing his skull. Stone remained deaf in one ear and impaired in the other.

Protected by Teachers

“I think that isolated me as I found it extremely difficult to communicate. At school I was protected by teachers . . . and what do you do with a person you can’t talk to? You give them a piece of paper. So I drew. People. My family. Home. Certainly lots of people.”

There was no artistic inheritance in the home. Stone’s father was a mailman. There was no infectious culture in the town. Stone lived in Colchester, one town on a skein of coastal resorts.

But Stone was befriended, inspired. Fred Herron, a department store manager, an amateur painter, gave the 8-year-old his passion for Rembrandt. There were art books to dream through, sketching trips to nearby Essex Marshes, and gifts of a paint box, a palette and a direction for life.

Herron took Stone, at 14, to London. In the morning there was the National Gallery and the first look at a real Rembrandt. In the afternoon there was the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition.

“There were a couple of pictures by Sir Gerald Kelly and these paintings, both portraits, were quite as exciting as anything I’d seen that morning. You could shake hands with them, they were so lifelike.

“So I wrote a fan letter to Sir Gerald.”

Kelly replied. He invited Stone to visit with his work. At 15, Stone was being critiqued by a man who, as a student, had handed canvases to Monet. And was studio boy to Rodin and Renoir.

“Kelly wasn’t particularly impressed,” remembered Stone. “I’d taken him portraits of my father, sketches of my younger sister, still lifes, things I’d copied from books as innocents will. He thought they showed more enthusiasm than talent.”

But Kelly did talk to the kid. He took him through his small collection. He told him of painting King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, the woman who would become the Queen Mother and, in decades to come, Stone’s first major commission. Kelly invited Stone to return and be taught through conversation.

“He told me to paint a woman like you were making love to her. Flesh must look as if it felt like flesh if you touched it. Noses had to project from the face. Lips had to look like they could move. He said: ‘You are a fly buzzing around the portrait and seeing all dimensions.’

“I knew then I was being encouraged.”

Stone was refused formal teaching by the Royal Academy and the Slade School of Fine Arts. His motives were too narrow. Stone was not interested in lithography or Impressionism, landscapes and all the graphic arts. Only portrait painting.

Sir Gerald Kelly understood. “And he would say: ‘Don’t become a second-rate Gerry Kelly . . . become a first-rate Richard Stone.’ Then he said: ‘Go away and paint a peach for me.’ Why? ‘Because if you can accurately portray the bloom on a peach you will be able to paint flesh better than anyone bar Renoir.’ ”

Stone painted the peach. Again and again. Then again.

Stone painted composer Sir Arthur Bliss. Kelly said it was the work he liked most. Then, he spoke a final caution: “Just because you can paint pictures of people, people won’t flock to your door to have their pictures painted. You’ll have to go out and knock on their doors.”

Three weeks later, at 92, Sir Gerald Kelly was dead.

Stone picked up a telephone and knocked on the most dignified of doors--Clarence House, the residence of the Queen Mother. He was turned down. The Queen Mother, he was told, poses only for portraits commissioned through official channels.

“I panicked,” Stone recalled. “I said: ‘Please don’t dismiss my work, because I could be a latter-day Rembrandt.’ ”

A stunned, amused, but certainly sympathetic comptroller invited Stone to bring his work to Clarence House. He was commissioned to paint the comptroller’s wife. Stone also received an entree to the Royal Anglian Regiment on the eve of its 10th anniversary . . . and for that occasion, the unit wanted a portrait of its colonel-in-chief, the Queen Mother.

“I spent three months working daily in the Garden Room at Clarence House, with about 10 hours of actual sittings,” he said. “We would talk about Kelly, who she had known, and Augustus John, who she collected. Monet. Matthew Smith. L. S. Lowry. She is very knowledgeable about art.”

The Queen Mother liked Stone’s work. With one reservation. “She pointed a finger at the portrait and asked me: ‘Would you take a little off my waist?’ ”

And of course he did. Because in portraiture, he continued, presentation of the required image is as important as indulging an artist’s sense of the photographic. He explained: “The Queen Mother is warm, understanding, sympathetic . . . but not nearly the personality the regiment wanted. They wanted their colonel-in-chief, the sash, the (Norman) Hartnell dress, the tiara. So I have to compromise and produce the image.”

With that one portrait, Stone’s career was off and running, although not exactly galloping.

He was commissioned to do a second portrait of the Queen Mother--but his income that “extremely good year” was a thundering $1,500. In 1978, Anglia Television filmed a full-length documentary of the youthful painter--yet Stone’s most consistent earnings were still coming from his lectures: “The Highlights and Lowlights of Being a Portrait Painter.”

Sadness and Pain

Stone was commissioned, again by the Anglian Regiment, to paint its deputy colonel-in-chief, Princess Margaret.

His private, preliminary sketches showed a variety of moods “from gaiety through to reflection, deep thought and sorrow.” The public portrait shows sadness and a little pain. “True,” Stone agreed. “She was going through a very difficult time with her health.”

The interpretation was not lost on the Princess. “She looked at the portrait and said: ‘Mr. Stone. You know I’ve been suffering from flu for the past two weeks . . . and I think you’ve caught it.’

“I really couldn’t help it if I’d only painted what I saw . . . so some adjustments were made. I made the nose less red and the face less puffy.”

The Queen Mother. Princess Margaret. Princess Michael. Sir Allan Davis. Lord Boothby. The credits continue to climb. So did Stone’s responsibilities; a home, a wife and two children. His income, sadly, remained several frills beneath modest.

For the past three years, in an effort to move himself closer to higher rollers, Stone has accepted an annual offer from Cunard Line: free first-class travel on QE2 across the Atlantic in exchange for a small exhibition of his paintings, plus lectures.

That’s how he found American patrons and marketing means in San Marino podiatrist Daniel McGann and his wife, Adele, an interior decorator.

Dan McGann wants to keep Stone’s talent burgeoning, to offer in America the portraiture that has satisfied the Bowes-Lyons and Windsors of England.

Stone is a little more prosaic about it all: “I’m looking for freedom, financial freedom that will allow me freedom of choice. Freedom to paint the masterpiece.” What masterpiece? “I have no idea. But something will hit me, no, will sing to me when I see it.”

So a new career demanding a transatlantic commute has begun.

Last month, Stone was finishing or beginning portraits of a Beverly Hills cardiologist, a Pasadena plastic surgeon, a tennis player’s children and a series of Southern California academics.

In this new market, his rates now are whatever seems fair and that currently is $6,000 for a 30x25-inch portrait. More for a background. Frame extra.

Back in England

This month, Stone is back in England to discuss another royal assignment. He will also be presenting his latest portrait of the Queen Mother to the Worshipful Company of Painter-Stainers, his guild and one of the oldest in London.

It will be a flattering but unpleasant experience.

“The saddest thing is that they are taking down Gerald Kelly’s painting of the Queen Mother to hang mine,” Stone said. “I’m very unhappy about that.”