CAN you tell what it is yet, Your Majesty? Oh gosh, it’s me, Mr Harris, and I don’t look at all bad for nearly 80. But are these really my teeth? Sight of the Queen’s incisors is a rarity in official portraits, but when Rolf Harris was granted two sittings to paint the monarch for a BBC One documentary and to mark her impending birthday, he told her he wanted to capture her warm personality and not the formality of her official status.

He came close to regretting it. At a preview of the finished work in the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, where it goes on public display from today, the artist better known for attacking giant canvases with a decorator’s brush admitted a struggle with the royal mouth.

“I had a problem with the teeth; it looked as though they were sitting on the bottom lip. I had to muck about with those teeth over and over again,” he said.

The mouth was only one battle in the artist’s combat with the 40in by 20in canvas, which he conducted over two months, often getting up in the middle of the night and creeping to his studio to fiddle with the detail. “It was a bit stressful when I couldn’t get the likeness right. And the first rough one that I did was exactly that, just a rough idea where the eyes were and the mouth. It sort of looked like a pork butcher from Norwich; it didn’t look like the Queen at all.”

The Times contacted Norwich to ascertain whether the city’s pork butchers looked anything like the Queen. They did not.

Finally satisfied that he had removed any resemblance to the proprietor of a charcuterie, the artist professed himself “thrilled to bits” with the finished version, which its sitter has yet to see.

“It shows a good likeness and a relaxation you don’t often see in official portraits. I wanted to capture the lady as she is — her humanness and humour. It’s got an impressionistic feel about it; it’s not a photograph.”

During one sitting, however, he took photographs for reference. “I asked her to look out of the window and then turn towards me as though greeting a treasured relative. I didn’t want her to have a rictus smile.” He said the sittings were informal and fun.

Asked if his subject could wear something colourful, the royal dresser appeared with a rail of outfits and he chose the turquoise one, decorated with the brooch the Queen had made for her mother’s 100th birthday.

“You’re OK with the smell of turpentine, I hope,” Harris asked, mindful of a previous sitter who had nearly fainted from it. “Well,” said the Queen, “we’ll soon know.”

As he worked away in the Yellow Drawing Room at Buckingham Palace, he told the Queen he had been startled a few days previously by a gun salute. “Did you know what it was?” she asked. He did not. “Neither did I,” said the Queen, with a quite unregal laugh. She subsequently found it marked Coronation Day.

The Queen never comments on official portraits but, given that the process was being filmed, the artist felt bound to ask her view before the work was finished. “It’s a very friendly painting,” said the Queen, who didn’t get where she is by being undiplomatic.

View Queen portrait gallery

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