As soon as upon a time, there was a princess in Denmark who aspired to turn out to be an artist.
Although she was the eldest youngster of the nation’s reigning king, for the primary 12 years of the princess’s life, solely males had the precise to inherit the throne. That modified when the Danish structure was amended in 1953, and the princess turned her father’s presumptive inheritor quickly after turning 13. She continued to pursue her curiosity in artwork all through her teenage years, producing drawings by the stacks earlier than largely stopping in her 20s.
Across the time the princess turned 30 — and after she had earned a diploma in prehistoric archaeology on the College of Cambridge, and had studied at Aarhus College in Denmark, the Sorbonne and the London College of Economics — she learn J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.” It impressed her to begin drawing once more.
Not lengthy after, upon her father’s dying in 1972, the princess was topped as queen: Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, to be particular.
Margrethe, now 83, celebrated 50 years on the throne in 2022. However in assuming the function of queen, she didn’t abandon her creative passions. As a monarch she has taken classes in sure media, has taught herself others and has been requested to deliver her eye to tasks produced by the Royal Danish Ballet and Tivoli, the world’s oldest amusement park, in Copenhagen.
Her work have been proven at museums, together with in a current exhibition on the Musée Henri-Martin in Cahors, France. And her illustrations have been tailored into art work for a Danish translation of “The Lord of the Rings.” (They had been printed beneath the pseudonym Ingahild Grathmer, and the e-book’s writer approached her about utilizing them after she despatched copies to Tolkien as fan mail in 1970.)
Margrethe lately notched one other inventive accomplishment: serving because the costume and manufacturing designer for “Ehrengard: The Artwork of Seduction,” a characteristic movie that debuted on Netflix in September and has wardrobes and units primarily based on her drawings and different artworks.
The movie is an adaptation of the fairy story “Ehrengard” by Karen Blixen, a Danish baroness who printed beneath the pen identify Isak Dinesen. Set in a fictional kingdom, the story is loosely a couple of girl named Ehrengard who turns into a lady-in-waiting and foils a royal court docket painter’s plot to woo her.
“It was nice enjoyable,” Margrethe mentioned of engaged on the movie in an interview in August on the Château de Cayx, the Danish royal household’s property in Luzech, a village close to Cahors within the South of France.
“I hope that Blixenites will settle for the way in which we’ve performed it,” she mentioned.
Conjuring Atmospheres
The Netflix adaptation, a type of fantasy dramedy produced by the corporate SF Studios, has been greater than a decade within the making.
JJ Movie, a Danish manufacturing firm additionally behind it, approached Margrethe about engaged on the film after she served as manufacturing designer for 2 shorter movies it produced, “The Snow Queen” and “The Wild Swans,” which had been each tailored from Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales. These movies, launched on Danish tv in 2000 and 2009, additionally featured units primarily based on artworks by Margrethe, who in 2010 turned an honorary member of the Danish Designers for Stage and Display union.
For the Netflix movie, the queen designed 51 costumes and made 81 decoupages — a kind of cut-and-paste art work — that had been used as the premise for units. (She was not paid by the manufacturing firms.) Her sketches, together with a number of the garments and lots of the decoupages, are being proven on the Karen Blixen Museum simply outdoors Copenhagen by means of subsequent April. Afterward, there are plans to point out them in New York, Washington and Seattle.
To compose the decoupages, the queen lower up pictures of varied landscapes and interiors and pasted the items collectively to create new scenes, like a luxurious sitting room and a rocky canyon with a fortress and a waterfall.
“Generally it takes hours, and generally issues wish to come collectively they usually do as you need them to do, and abruptly you’ve performed an entire decoupage in a day,” she mentioned. “It’s type of a puzzle.”
She was guided by Blixen’s “very visible writing,” she mentioned, noting that Blixen, in addition to Tolkien and Andersen, had been writers who additionally painted or drew.
Bille August, 74, the movie’s director, described the queen’s decoupages as a “tuning fork” that he used to construct “a world that’s indifferent from actuality with out being a full-on fairy story.” (He in contrast the final visible type he sought to the tone of Baz Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge!”)
“Conjuring that particular environment is probably the queen’s biggest achievement right here,” Mr. August mentioned.
Scouts would search areas that mirrored the decoupages, which set designers would then type with props to additional emulate the artworks. Parts within the decoupages that couldn’t be discovered had been rendered utilizing computer-generated imagery. Some decoupages had been scanned and particulars from the artworks had been added to scenes in postproduction.
Blixen didn’t set “Ehrengard” in a particular time, giving Margrethe freedom to interpret the look of the costumes. She selected to base her designs on garments from the Biedermeier interval in Austria and different elements of central and northern Europe, which befell from 1815 to 1848.
Anne-Dorthe Eskildsen, 56, the movie’s costume supervisor, mentioned she usually translated Margrethe’s sketches “one to 1” when fabricating the clothes, which had been made with textiles and trimmings that the queen helped choose.
Margrethe mentioned that for one costume she had sketched — a gown in hunter inexperienced with pink paisley-like specks — she had hoped to discover a sprigged material. “However we couldn’t discover one,” she mentioned, so the sample was customized printed. One other costume designed for the movie’s grand duchess character was impressed by a portrait of a French queen.
“She was sporting a beautiful get-up,” Margrethe mentioned. “It appeared to me precisely what the grand duchess must be sporting.”
Sure parts of the costumes, like leg-of-mutton sleeves, mirrored vogue on the time of the Biedermeier interval. “I fairly like that type,” Margrethe mentioned. “I’ve been enthusiastic about type and within the historical past of fashion and costume for a really very long time.”
Different particulars had been much less traditionally correct: Some attire had waistlines that had been barely decrease than these typical of that period, to present them a extra flattering match.
Mikkel Boe Folsgaard, 39, the actor who performed the court docket painter, Cazotte, mentioned that when Margrethe noticed an early model of his costume, she thought it lacked colour. “And she or he was clear about precisely which colours she needed to see,” he added.
The actress Alice Bier Zanden, 28, who performed the title function of Ehrengard within the movie, mentioned that at a dressing up becoming attended by Margrethe, the queen’s enthusiasm was palpable. “You’re simply obsessed on it,” she mentioned.
Sidse Babett Knudsen, 54, who performed the grand duchess, described the queen’s presence on the becoming this fashion: “naked legs, stunning footwear, good jewellery — smoking away.” (Margrethe has made no secret of her fondness for cigarettes.)
Ms. Knudsen added that she felt snug “clowning round” in entrance of Margrethe, who has usually been in style in Denmark. In keeping with a 2021 ballot by YouGov Denmark, she was essentially the most admired girl within the nation (essentially the most admired man was Barack Obama), and in a 2013 Gallup ballot carried out for Berlingske, Denmark’s oldest newspaper, 82 % of members agreed or partly agreed that the nation advantages from the monarchy.
Her critics have included members of her household. Prince Joachim, the youthful of her two sons, bristled at her current determination to shrink the monarchy by stripping his kids of their royal titles. In 2017 her husband, Prince Henrik, introduced that he didn’t want to be buried beside Margrethe as a result of he had by no means been given the titles king or king consort. (He died six months later.)
Helle Kannik Haastrup, 58, an affiliate professor of movie and media research on the College of Copenhagen, who focuses on celeb tradition, mentioned that some detractors have dismissed Margrethe as “a Sunday painter.”
However to different individuals, Professor Haastrup added, the truth that Margrethe is a head of state with a “facet hustle” has made her extra relatable.
‘Truthfully, She Can’t Cease’
Margrethe sketches and makes artwork on the chateau in France and at studios at Amalienborg Palace and Fredensborg Palace, the royal household’s residences in Denmark. She described the studios as locations “the place I can let issues lie about,” including, “I attempt to clear them up sometimes — however not too typically!”
“I work after I can discover the time,” she mentioned, “and I appear often to have the ability to discover the time.”
“Generally, I feel individuals are at their wit’s finish as a result of I’m making an attempt to do these two issues on the identical time,” Margrethe mentioned of her royal duties and her inventive undertakings. “But it surely often works, doesn’t it?”
Annelise Wern, one of many queen’s 4 ladies-in-waiting, mentioned, “Truthfully, she will be able to’t cease.”
Within the Nineteen Eighties, when she was in her 40s, Margrethe took weekly portray classes. She has principally focused on portray landscapes with watercolors and acrylics — or “lazy lady’s oils,” as she known as them.
Then, within the early Nineties, she began chopping up pages from The World of Interiors magazines and catalogs from public sale homes like Christie’s and Sotheby’s and utilizing the paper cutouts to embellish objects.
“I didn’t even know there was a wise identify for it,” she mentioned, referring to decoupage. “I known as it ‘chopping and sticking.’”
Since then, her kin have sometimes been “smothered in decoupage,” as she jokingly put it. And in needlepoint, which she had realized as a woman and picked up once more later in life.
Her colourful needlepoint designs, a few of which had been lately featured in an exhibition on the Museum Kolding in Kolding, Denmark, have been customary into purses for relations and have been used to upholster fire screens, footstools and cushions for the royal household’s yacht, Dannebrog, which shares its identify with the Danish flag.
Margrethe’s style for daring colours might be additionally seen in her wardrobe. In a 1989 biography of the queen by the Danish journalist Anne Wolden-Raethinge, Margrethe mentioned: “I at all times dream in colour. At full blast. Technicolor. All over the place. Each shade.”
Her garments typically characteristic vivid prints and fur trims, and are nearly at all times accessorized with jewellery. Among the many gadgets in her private assortment are gold items by the Danish jewelers Arje Griegst and Torben Hardenberg, whose designs are each baroque and gothic-punk, and costume jewellery like plastic clip-on earrings she discovered at a Danish drugstore.
For her eightieth birthday, in 2020, Margrethe had a robe made utilizing velvet that she had requested be dyed a specific shade of sky blue. A floral raincoat she had made with a waxed material meant for tablecloths, which she picked out on the division retailer Peter Jones & Companions in London, has impressed different vogue designers’ collections.
“I often am fairly deeply concerned,” she mentioned of getting garments made for her.
Ulf Pilgaard, 82, a Danish stage and display screen actor, has parodied the queen some dozen occasions over the a long time. (He was knighted by Margrethe in 2007.) “I at all times wore earrings and a necklace and really good colourful outfits,” Mr. Pilgaard mentioned.
For his final flip as Margrethe, in 2021, he wore a brilliant yellow gown with oversize pearl earrings and a chunky turquoise ring. On the finish of the efficiency, she shocked him onstage.
“Individuals acquired on their ft and began roaring and clapping,” he mentioned. “For just a few seconds, I believed it was all for me.”
On the premiere of “Ehrengard: The Artwork of Seduction” in Copenhagen final month, Margrethe wore a pantsuit within the purple colour of the Danish flag (and the Netflix emblem), together with a hefty turquoise brooch and matching earrings by Mr. Hardenberg, who earlier than beginning his namesake jewellery line made costumes and props for theater and movie productions.
Nanna Fabricius, 38, a Danish singer and songwriter generally known as Oh Land, who has labored alongside Margrethe on current productions at Tivoli, mentioned, “I feel a really huge a part of why the queen is so appreciated is as a result of she does issues.”
“We aren’t completely shocked when she makes a Netflix film,” she added.
“She’s type of what Barbie desires to be,” Ms. Fabricius mentioned. “She does all of it.”