Andrew’s aghast eyes echo The Scream — an arrest photo as royal portrait

Phil Noble’s photograph of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor leaving Aylsham police station in the back of his Range Rover captures a startling, private moment. Noble’s harsh, blinding flash paints Andrew in pink, red and white; his skin looks sickly, his eyes hollow and red, and his hands are steepled as if in prayer.

Much like the eerily similar 2019 picture of Prince Philip in a car, the composition was a matter of chance — Noble took several shots as Mountbatten-Windsor hurried past and only this one came out right. In an age of endless images, this photograph has risen above the visual noise.

Whatever precise crimes Mountbatten-Windsor is or isn’t guilty of, the shot conveys a visceral anguish: the look of someone frozen in wide-eyed dismay and overwhelmed by repercussions. Commentators trace those eyes to a long visual tradition — the same dazed, stupefied stare found in Munch’s The Scream, Courbet’s Desperate Man, Otto Dix’s war etchings, Francis Bacon’s screaming popes and Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son.

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