Patrick Lichfield

Guard and Tortoise

1960

Patrick Lichfield (1939-2005) Officially Thomas Patrick John Anson, 5th Earl of Lichfield Boy Wearing a Palestinian Keffiyeh, c. 1960 Gelatin silver print 38 x 29.1 cm. Provenance: Patrick Lichfield, who gifted to Hugh Myddelton Biddulph (1995-2021); Passed to Gaia Servadio (1938-2021); By descent to Orlando Mostyn-Owen (b. 1973); Private Collection, United Kingdom. This charming portrait expresses a moment of universal tenderness, the young boy grinning with a charismatic ease, his eyes lit with recent laughter. A cultural insight is provided by the Palestinian keffiyeh which he wears loosely around his head, a traditional and deeply sybmolic headdress worn in arid regions of the Middle East. Prior to the 1930s, keffiyeh were worn by rural workers, whereas city residents and the educated elite wore the Ottoman tarbush (or fez). However, during the 1936-39 Arab revolt in Palestine, rebel commanders ordered all Arabs to wear the keffiyeh. The black and white design as seen in the present photograph was popularised in the 1950s, after Sir John Bagot Glubb wanted to distinguish his Palestinian soldiers from the Jordanians (whose keffiyeh were red and white). The alternating pattern represents economically and culturally significant olive leaves, while the fish net motif symbolises fishing and the sea. The photograph is one taken by Lichfield on a visit to the Empty Quarter with his lifelong friend Hugh Myddelton Biddulph, of Chirk Castle, Wales. The sand desert encompasses most of the southern third of the Arabian Peninsula, and the visit was one of Lichfield’s earliest to the Middle East, which he would revisit throughout his career (particularly Dubai). The pair travelled through the region on a Mini Moke, carrying basic supplies and sleeping in a teepee. The photograph was left after Myddelton’s death to his second wife Gaia Servadio, the eccentric Italian journalist, writer, and first mother-in-law to Boris Johnson. After her death in 2021, it passed to her artist son Orlando Mostyn-Owen, and later into a private British collection. Patrick Lichfield was born in 1939, the son of Thomas Anson, Viscount Anson, and Anne Bowes-Lyon, later Princess Anne of Denmark. After seven years in the Grenadier Guards, Lichfield began his career as a photographer’s assistant in 1962 to Kasterine and Michael Wallis, after which he earned a five-year contract with American Vogue; he benefited greatly from his access to the royal family, since Queen Elizabeth was his maternal first cousin. In 1981 he took the official photograph for the wedding of the Prince and Princess of Wales. Although best known for his portraits of the royal family, Lichfield’s celebrity portraits included Yves Saint Laurent, Jane Birkin, Cecil Beaton, David Hockney, Kate Bush, Ian McKellen, Joan Collins, Joanna Lumley...

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