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[Warning: the following review may distress those who are unaccustomed to gratuitous personal abuse of our head of state.]

A slender young lady, with vacant eyes and jaws which look too big to fit comfortably into her face. Of course, a practical woman can always rely upon cosmetics to alleviate such an unfortunate effect, but this lady has instead accentuated her jaws by painting glossy pink lips around them. One is left with the impression of a blank shadowy princess hovering briefly behind a huge flash of lipstick and shark teeth. Despite her beautiful figure, she is not really sexually attractive. Indeed, she seems unpleasantly chaste and if you met her she would probably smell of disinfectant.

They make her Queen, but throughout the first decade of her reign she looks like an ordinary person wearing a costume. Yousuf Karsh photographed a child playing at Queen, perched on a throne which is clearly meant for an adult and with her nose pointing prettily in the air. In the first of Dorothy Wilding’s snaps – which is hand-coloured like commemorative Victorian porcelain – the Queen flirts repulsively with us, her eyes for once slightly daring, her shark mouth twitching to bite a chunk of flesh out of a passing whale. In Wilding’s second photo, the Queen throbs tenderly with a starched glamour and, if you forgot about those jaws for a second, you could almost envisage holding her body lightly by the fingertips and kissing those smooth arms.

In the 1960s, the Queen was mostly portrayed looking bored, which was supposed to indicate that she was a faithful housewife. In these photos, she has been placed within little displays of equally bored-looking children. But Pietro Annigoni gets a huzzah! for his 1969 portrait, which reimagines the Queen as a defiantly medieval warrior-sovereign. A fat red duck has alighted on a lonely mudflat, its vast wings lowered around its body like a cloak. That great mouth is small and tight and cross. The sky is so black that it looks as if the sun has never peeped through it.

But let us pause at this moment to glance around the exhibition, which incidentally, can be found (until September 18th) in the basement of the Scottish National Gallery on the Mound. I am the only male in the room who is under fifty, and the overwhelming majority of the punters are sniffy Morningside housewives, who barge their way past the glossy photographs as if they are hunting for bargains in the latest sale at Jenners. Each of them resembles an inferior and less distinguished copy of the original monarch, like a dodgy homemade banknote, or like one of a great hive of bees which is swarming around some essence of the founding Queen.

If they demand propriety, then they certainly get it. The notices accompanying each portrait remain gently respectful towards the monarch, only remarking wistfully on any sign of a disappointing lack of deference. Snaps by the society photographer and royal crony Lord Lichfield are described as “informal,” whilst equivalent images from Reuters are “intrusive.” Never in this exhibition do the words “unelected” or “at taxpayers’ expense” appear. The exhibition literature is also determined to treat each piece of art as evidence of some greater historical moment. In one photograph, the Michael Fagan debacle and a homosexual scandal amongst the Queen’s bodyguards are offered to explain “the strain evident” in the “expression” of her expressionless face, when whatever is in that vacuum could be caused merely by indigestion.

“God save the Queen/ ’Cause tourists are money.” It is, of course, massively cynical – virtually outrageous, in fact – for a prestigious art gallery to conduct itself like one of those cheap tartan-themed gift shops on the Royal Mile – which are owned by Bangladeshi entrepreneurs and belt out a never-ending soundtrack of bagpipe strains and trance music – in a shameless appeal to the sort of clueless American tourist who has visited Edinburgh under the misapprehension that it is Stratford upon Avon and wishes to purchase tawdry souvenirs of ye quaint Englande. It would be infinitely preferable, I tell myself very primly, if the SNG had awarded this exhibition space to some worthy, local graffiti artists.

The exhibition will need to cultivate a lofty sense of postmodern sophistication to get away with such a tasteless celebration of the Royal Family. They were probably loathe to exclude Rolf Harris’ naff but somehow revolutionary portrait of the Queen, in which she is for once belting out a radiant smile. By the time that the exhibition has reached the 1980s, the balance has been somewhat redressed with the Sex Pistols’ artwork, something characteristically witless by Gilbert and George, and a series of Andy Warhol’s bland Day-Glo prints. Yet the prevailing effect is of a pack of tiresome Court Jesters without a good joke between them.

The final room, however, is full of treats and surprises, and it ultimately kicks this exhibition into shape. People often claim that when a painting is encountered in real life it possesses a certain aura which is always lacking in photographs, but I have only ever found this to be the case with Lucian Freud’s pictures. True to form, his image of the Queen is absolutely electrifying.

For a long time it confounds any attempt to interpret it. A meaty head which seems to be boiling in the juices of some obscure, mad emotion, the whole face clenched like a fist, the lip curling beautifully with something which almost but not wholly resembles contempt. Freud has remarked that, “normally I underplay facial expression when painting the figure, because I want expression to emerge through the body” but here his achievement is to pack the Queen’s normally expressionless face with more passion than King Lear.

This tiny canvas looks like it has been cut out of a much bigger one, and it leaves you wondering what the Queen might be doing or experiencing within the complete picture. The canvas has been mounted at head height, which makes you suddenly freeze with a sense that the Queen is glaring with disapproval at your own crotch. One thus wilts before her sovereign majesty.

Agreeing to be portrayed by Freud is undoubtedly the most daring and radical act to be ever undertaken by the Queen, and whilst there was outrage in the tabloids when this picture was first unveiled in 2001, it is impossible to imagine how else Freud could have portrayed her. When living through the Britpop era, it seemed that every week the newspapers were reporting on some fatuous stunt by Tracy Emin or Damien Hirst, but the sheer, surreal spectacle of this portrait demonstrates a cajones and panache which are unique to any work of “controversial” modern art. In five hundred years time, it will be the only image from this exhibition to still survive. It is truly a masterpiece.

But there are other good things too. Hew Locke has built a vague sense of the Queen’s face out of a gorgeous, dripping rock pool of cheap jewellery and old plastic toys. One could gaze into it for hours. In Justin Mortimer’s portrait, the Queen appears to have returned from a trip to the guillotine. A bruised decapitated head with a single glazed eye are placed above a body which is laid out with the awkwardness of a corpse. If one wonders what on Earth Mortimer was thinking (Mortimer: “I told them this was going to be a really funky piece of work and I got the sense that they were quite relieved. Otherwise it would have been the Queen in a nasty dress, and who wants to see another of those?”), then there is an overall mystery about intention throughout much of the final room.

In defiance of the spontaneity of the modern media – and perhaps as part of an insistence upon old fashioned values of care and craftsmanship (amusingly in the light of the latest fashionable crackpot portraits of the Queen, her favourite artist is apparently Stubbs)  – some of the modern portraits have been produced through procedures more elaborate than ancient mummification. Freud reportedly requested 72 sittings in order to execute his tiny mad daub of the Queen (it remains unreported how many he got), whilst Chris Levine needed to take 10000 photographs to produce his somewhat unsatisfactory 3D simulation of her head, which is bathed in blue light and looks as if it is being stored in a fridge. It is rather odd that Levine’s image of the Queen with her eyes closed has been selected for the exhibition poster. She appeared to be dead and lying in state, but perhaps they had originally prepared this exhibition to mark her death and then, unlike Charles, they had given up and reverted to dedicating the show to her diamond jubilee.

The Queen has lately grown as sartorially berserk as Salvador Dali. In one press photograph the Queen is apparently attempting to recover from the tabloid mauling which followed her disinterest in the death of Princess Diana, and she has visited a Glasgow council house to have tea with an “ordinary person” in a sort of public declaration that she is a human being. Yet she has turned up in a piercing pink dress, looking like a monstrous poisonous beetle. These days her shark grin seems more fiendish than ever, and in the final portrait of the exhibition, an especially-commissioned photograph from Thomas Struth, she is scoffing as pleased as Punch. In the coming years, as she degenerates into complete senility and a horrified Parliament realises that it has no constitutional powers to remove her, we will surely be treated to many more striking and evocative images of the Queen.