Intimate sketches including one of the best-known portraits of the late Queen Elizabeth II have gone on sale at auction with estimates ranging from as little as £80. Blackpool-born artist, Jeff Stultiens (1944-2023), unveiled a larger-than-life depiction of the monarch to celebrate her 2003 Golden Jubilee which was “thought to be the most monumental portrait of The Queen ever produced”.
After its commission, the artist was granted six hour-long sessions with Her Majesty in the drawing room of Buckingham Palace. In an interview with BBC Breakfast when the portrait was unveiled, Stultiens called The Queen “very obliging and very co-operative”.
He said: “It’s a straight painting. It’s absolutely straight. It looks like the Queen and for me it feels like the Queen.”
The painter said he wanted the portrait to be regal and asked for the Queen to be dressed in her garter robes. He said: “I found her pretty interesting. We had very interesting conversations, the Queen was very perceptive and quite knowledgeable about art.”
The artist’s range of work from oils to pencil sketches are now on sale at Hansons Auctioneers’ online auction, at its Hertfordshire saleroom in Royston.
It closes on August 24, with estimates ranging from as little as £80 to an eye-watering £2,000.
The 207-lot collection, consigned by the artist’s ex-wife and the couple’s two daughters, also includes portraits of His Eminence Cardinal Basil Hume, the percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie, the pioneering respiratory doctor Professor Dame Margaret Turner-Warwick and Professor Dame Carol Black (a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery and renowned physician).
After leaving Blackpool, the artist studied at the Camberwell School of Art in London in the 1960s. A member of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, he went on to live in Toddington, Bedfordshire, where he died in 2003, aged 79.
His paintings reside in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery as well as several other important national collections.
A spokesperson for Hansons said: “Stultiens was a gifted portrait painter, always striving to convey the inner qualities of a person as much as their outward appearance, even with notable sitters such as Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.”
