Forget Cavaliers versus Roundheads, republicans versus monarchists or even Harry versus Wills. The question dividing royal watchers this week is: King Charles in oils, triumph or disaster? Never before has a royal portrait gone viral. Hans Holbein may have held Whitehall spellbound and Van Dyck might have set the court buzzing, but this is the first painted portrait of a king to hit social media and the nation is split down the middle. Half of us are swiping right in patriotic approval, half swiping left in iconoclastic protest.
Comments by Times readers showed a pretty even split. The detractors couldn’t get along with the background: “disembodied head and hands floating in a sea of crushed raspberries”, “suspended in a sea of blood”, “it looks
