This portrait (top) of Princess Margaret by Pietro Annigoni is to go on public exhibition for the first time in more than 30 years at the National Portrait Gallery in London. It hung on a wall in her apartments at Kensington Palace and was inherited by her son Viscount Linley, (David Linley of furniture fame) after her death, and along with many other of her possessions was auctioned to meet GBP3m in death duties. Such is the interest in items with historical provenance that the sale raised GBP14m. The picture itself was sold for GBP680,000 and the buyer turned out to be Linley himself. Annigoni painted the portrait at about the same time (1954-55) as the one he did of the Queen (centre), which in my view is the best ever produced during her reign, and which was used extensively on stamps and banknotes of countries where she is head of state, or which are the remnants of the empire.
I have a print of the Queen's portrait, signed by Annigoni which I like for its stark simplicity, compared to the glorious and romantic colours of the oil, which evokes the hopes and aspirations of the British people for their young monarch, (in her twenties), at the beginning of her reign, the new "Elizabethan Age", recovering from the debilitation of the war which had virtually bankrupted the country and saw the divestment of the empire.
