Presto Change-o: Royal Portrait Airbrushed to Switch Monarchs

That PhotoShop is so early 20th Century.

Yep, the royal family has been doing the airbrush thing a good while before today's model-photographing populace. The proof is in a "retouched" portrait of none other than King George VI, he of "The King's Speech." 

This portrait is identical in every way but one to the coronation portrait of George's predecessor, the short-serving King Edward VIII, who abdicated the throne in order to marry Wallis Simpson. Edward posed for the portrait in 1936, not long before his coronation. George's coronation would have been a couple of years later.

Why did they do it? To save money? Perhaps. War was in the air, of course, and good painting supplies would have been hard to find. But you have to wonder why the Royal Family, with its sense of history, would have done such a thing. The two options, it seems to me, were to redo the thing completely or to destroy the original. 

See, this is the trouble. People keep things lying around in dark closets or tucked away in vaults and then the people who thought it was a big deal forget about the things lying around in dark closets or tucked away in vaults and then modern people come alone and dredge them out to look at them, get all excited, and want to publish.

That's the world we live in these days: publish, publish, publish. Every second smartphone has a camera that is three clicks away from publication (shoot, log on to Facebook, click on Post). It's all about the publication. It's all about the sharing. It's all about getting anything and everything out there as quickly as possible so that the world can witness the brilliance of the person doing the posting.

In this case, those doing the posting were the Illustrated London News, with a special coronation issue. They found in the archives this lovely little portrait of Edward, whose marriage to Simpson ended so tragically, and they decided to publish it all these years later. Some smart-eyed readers wrote in to say that Edward's portrait looked a whole lot like George's, and the re-use was uncovered.

So lesson learned for the Royal Family, right? Perhaps, except that they'e also admitted that they reused some other of Edward's coronation items for George. No wonder the poor guy had trouble speaking. He was walking around with a chip on his shoulder that would have made him permanently tilt to one side.