Internet goofballs are having a field day with King Charles’ portrait

The purpose of art is to inspire and incite discourse, and the recently unveiled portrait of King Charles has certainly done that. The current monarch of the United Kingdom was coronated last year, and it’s a common tradition for painters to sit down with heads of state to create a personalized portrait of them. On May 14, King Charles’ portrait by artist Jonathan Yeo was revealed to the public, and while some art critics wanted to debate the heavy use of red in the portrait and the symbology therein, other people decided to just make some banger memes out of the painting.

There’s the very obvious comparison to Soulsborne games. FromSoftware designers seem to love nothing more than decorating a crumbling castle with massive, ominous portraits. (Actually, some members of FromSoftware might love poison swamps slightly more than ominous paintings, but it’s debatable.)

Of course, a painting this ominous can fit into a whole smorgasbord of settings. Consider this mod for Dishonored, which allows you to steal King Charles’ portrait in-between murdering Corvo’s many enemies. The image would also fit nicely in the original Doom, as this mock-up proves.

Personally, I’m a fan of this Disco Elysium interpretation of the portrait created by Stivkun on X.

The portrait is also easily substituted into movies. Ghostbusters 2’s painting of Vigo the Carpathian is an easy example here. Or the painting could fit neatly into the environment of The Shining, which is a notoriously unsettling hotel. Some artists are even taking the portrait’s style — which I personally find striking and evocative — and applying it to other fictional characters.

The painting has inspired a lot of genuine critical discourse about its style, the message, and the monarchy itself. But I’m an easily amused magpie, and I love seeing how moments like this are re-interpreted through a goofy lens. These memes are brief, and fleeting, but for a moment they are beautiful.