How best to capture Prince Charles’ beloved Camilla?
Try five hourlong sittings while discussing “The Killing” and the Duchess of Cornwall’s other favorite Scandinavian crime dramas.
“We had a nice time, but it’s not my best work,” Diarmuid Kelley says of that royal portrait he painted in 2013. “I probably would have gotten more done if I hadn’t enjoyed the sittings so much. But Charles did say he was very pleased.”
That portrait hangs at a British Army officers’ mess hall. But more than 20 of Kelley’s other paintings are getting their first New York showing at the Stellan Holm gallery on Madison Avenue.
Looking at his lush, Old Master-like still lifes and portraits, some with cheeky titles — one, “Edith Piaf (said it better than me),” the 47-year-old artist stole from a song by the pop band Sparks — it’s easy to see why Prince Charles, a watercolorist himself, is a fan. Soon after that commission, the couple invited the artist to join them on a royal visit to Mexico and Colombia.
“Charles always takes a painter on these trips, because he’s a patron of the arts,” Kelley tells The Post. “He’ll give the artist a driver, and they can go anywhere they want and do all the things Charles would like to do, like paint landscapes. [The royals] work hard on that trip.”
Kelley says he owes it all to a college friend, now in the British Army, who used to pose for him in his grand-looking uniform on Sunday mornings, “working off his hangover.” Charged with commissioning portraits for his regiment, whose patron is Camilla, he introduced the royals to Kelley’s paintings.
Diarmuid Kelley’s “Edith Piaf (said it better than me)”Diarmuid Kelley“They were really keen on what they saw,” Kelley says. So began his five trips to London’s Lancaster House, near St. James’ Palace, where he painted the Duchess in a room filled with “beautiful furnishings, fantastic wallpaper … and a bust of Winston Churchill.”
Although he addresses Camilla and Charles by the same honorific, Your Royal Highness, Kelley says they’re not “brittle” at all: “I’ve met people who have no titles whatsoever who are far more snobbish!”
So far, the couple own four of his paintings. Kate Capshaw — Mrs. Steven Spielberg — has one, too. But while the Spielbergs sent him flowers, they don’t mail the artist a Christmas card each year, the way Charles and Camilla do.
“It’s always nice to get because it’s huge, and it’s got Buckingham Palace on the [envelope],” Kelley says. “I always leave it in the [mail box] slightly longer than necessary for our neighbors to see.”
Diarmuid Kelley’s recent paintings from London’s Offer Waterman Gallery are on view at Stellan Holm, 1018 Madison Ave. (between 78th and 79th streets), through Nov. 30.
