Rolf Harris and the Queen

Wandering in my mind a bit, as perhaps many of us are, visiting YouTube, reading things, drawing things, thinking about things too - I came across the Rolf Harris portrait of HM the Queen - that is, the programme in which he painted her for her 80th birthday portrait.   For all the snide comments one could make - she was a lot more patient with his chat than I would have been, although it's fair to remember he was making a TV programme and could hardly subject his viewers to a comment-free experience - he didn't make a bad stab at it at all.  Spent more time on the dress than I think he should have done, as a means of putting off the evil day when he had to finish the painting of the mouth: always, I think, the trickiest thing for a portrait painter to get right; but one understood why, and along the way he encounters problems with which any oil painter has to contend.   Technically, the film is interesting.  So far as Harris's personality is concerned - OK, we're all conditioned now to concentrate on his various sins and malfeasances, but are they artistically of any relevance at all?  We know that Caravaggio was, probably, a murderer; quite possibly a rapist as well; certainly one who troubled young boys; that Michelangelo took his father's advice to "never wash", and probably stank like a goat; that Picasso was a philandering old devil; that Francis Bacon had some distinctly strange habits; that Pollock was soaked in booze and drugs for much of his life.  That Dalí was either a fascist or as near to one as makes little difference.  List your artists' wicked habits here.   And of course, I also know that Harris's particular crimes were extremely repugnant, and that he's in denial of them.  And yet - what has that to do with his art?  His portrait of the Queen was not the summit of his achievement: it was completed under adverse conditions, at too great a speed, on the basis of too few sittings.  And yet I look at his other paintings, not least at some displayed a good many years ago in The Artist magazine - and this is a real artist; a painter in oils whose methods are not mine, but were sound in their way.   A damn' sight better a painter than the saintly Bob Ross, to take a slightly crass comparison. I don't know how his paintings fare in the market place these days; not well, I suspect.  But if they don't, that's a feature of a corrupted market, not a comment on Harris's ability.   Anyway, there's a controversial mid-lockdown Easter post for you!  Comments?