You don’t need to be in fashion to be inundated, almost on a daily basis, with images of Cara Delevingne. Her face appears in Instagram feeds in the form of funny selfies; on screens emoting for directors like Joe Wright and Luc Besson; and in glossy magazine pages, where she models for Chanel and stars in editorials. I don’t think it’s a stretch to call the 23-year-old Brit today’s ultimate It girl, an omnipresent icon for the social media age. As such, it’s hard to think that there could be a way of depicting Delevingne that we haven’t seen before. That will change this weekend, when a series of portraits by famed painter Jonathan Yeo opens at Denmark’s Museum of National History.
“She suggested it, actually,” Yeo says over the phone in a speedy English accent. “Then she came to sit for me, and I realized what a brilliant chameleon she is. She has the ability to be serious, and then to clown around within a fraction of a second. She’s obviously got a huge range of expressions and moods in her armory and a very interesting face to start with. It then occurred to me that she would be the perfect person to try out this idea of doing a load of different images with.” Yeo’s compliments aren’t empty pleasantries—he’s painted everyone from Prime Minister David Cameron to Helena Bonham Carter and has an almost scientific approach to his study of faces and the personalities behind them, himself an expert at cutting away the selves people present to get down to the core of someone’s personality.
“Obviously, I’ve painted all kinds of people, from royalty to politicians to Hollywood stars and everything—and maybe partly because she’s young, but she certainly comes in without any airs or graces. She’s totally relaxed and down-to-earth and fun. She doesn’t—unlike some people who are in the business of being glamorous and looking fantastic—seem remotely concerned about whether she looked good or bad or silly or however,” he says of Delevingne.
The pair met for five or six sittings in Yeo’s studio, each sometimes months apart to accommodate Delevingne’s hectic schedule. The resulting pieces, in pastel-colored oils, show the actress engaging with various modes of seeing, whether through an iPhone screen, mirror, or old-fashioned aviation goggles. The message is not hard to intuit: “It’s about being seen. She’s someone who, obviously, is one of the most visible people in the outside world,” the painter begins, explaining that digital technology, social media, and the Internet have not only changed the way we take pictures, but also the way we interpret and understand them. “I wasn’t sure if people would pick up on these ideas and their relevance now, or would just pick up on it as someone famous. It’s reassured me but also underlined the point of it all that actually there’s clearly an appetite for reading these images and understanding things and expecting things to reference other things now, which again is because everyone is looking at images in a different way and discussing them. You can see how people discuss them on Instagram if you look at what people comment.”
When Delevingne first began to tease the portraits on her Instagram, her four posts drew upwards of 2,473,000 likes and 5,700 comments. “It’s exciting for my job because it means people are much more tuned in to images,” Yeo says. “It also means artists, and especially portrait artists and photographers, really have to up their game now because we have a much more sophisticated audience and they’ll be expecting images that have layers of narrative and meaning to them. We’re going to move into a very exciting period for this sort of thing.”
“Jonathan Yeo Portraits” at The Museum of National History, Frederiksborg Castle, Denmark, opens on March 20 and runs through June 30.
Cara Delevingne takes us on a tour of her home away from home aka Hogwarts: