A Few Words With a Royal Artist

By JAMES BARRON

Alexander Creswell was saying he had drawn while bouncing in a speedboat alongside a yacht and while hanging out of a helicopter. So the watercolor showing what happened on April 29 of last year - something that happened indoors, that did not involve splashing or motion sickness and that was over in less than an hour - must have been an easy assignment, right?

“No,” he said.

Mr. Creswell is a British artist with 38 watercolors in the Royal Collection, which has its Rembrandts and Vermeers, and also the crown jewels - and which has been making acquisitions since the Middle Ages. That's a lot longer than April 29 of last year.

Why does April 29 of last year keep coming up, anyway? For Americans who do not memorize important dates in the royals' lives, April 29 of last year was the day on which Prince William married Kate Middleton in Westminster Abbey.

And Mr. Creswell's maque tte - in effect, the final draft of the larger one that went to the newlyweds - is on display in New York in an exhibition at the Hirschl & Adler Galleries at 730 Fifth Avenue, where a reception was held on Tuesday.

Back to April 29 of last year. For Mr. Creswell, it was a workday, and a complicated one. “I very nearly didn't get there because of the crowds,” he said, and he had allowed time for an early start.

As it was, he was in his seat, sketching, “two hours before and four hours after.” He said he covered 25 pages in his sketchbook. He even did “watercolor notes” - sketches in color - so that he would have a record of the colors of the day when he painted the final version, back in the studio.

“I was drawing as all the guests arrived,” he said. By the time the ceremony was over, he said, “I was drawing without looking at what I was drawing. You download from your eyes. You've got to get it down while you remember it.”

The maq uette apparently passed muster with the bridegroom's father. Prince Charles visited Mr. Creswell's studio - “not to approve it or anything,” Mr. Creswell said. What was the prince's reaction to the maquette? “I survived to paint another day.”

At the time, Mr. Creswell was working in the studio of the late-Victorian painter George Frederic Watts, who is famous for large allegorical scenes and for the way G.K. Chesterton described him: “He may not be certain that he is successful, or certain that he is great, or certain that he is good, or certain that he is capable: but he is certain that he is right.”

Mr. Creswell was the first painter to work in Watts's studio in Surrey since Watts died in 1904; the reception at the Hirschl & Adler Galleries on Tuesday honored the Watts Gallery in Surrey's efforts to save Watts's house there.

Mr. Creswell has said he found watercolor appealing because it is considered the most difficult medium. “You cannot m ake mistakes” in a watercolor, he said. “Well, you cannot correct them.”

He does not work on a small, delicate scale: The maquette of the royal wedding is 22 inches by 30 inches, and “Roman Forum,” completed in 2006, is nine feet wide by five feet tall. “I'm pushing the boundaries,” he said. “I'm starting a 12-by-5.”

He has been closely associated with the royal family for more than 20 years, but said he had not met Prince William or Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge. “I've been in the same room as them on occasion.”

The royal family and the House of Lords commissioned him to paint the lying in state of the Queen Mother after her death in 2002, and he was the official artist when Prince Charles went on a tour of Central Europe in 1998.

“The artist's job is to see things he is too busy to see,” Mr. Creswell said, describing Prince Charles's trip as “six manic days, drawing at state banquets” in Slovakia and Bulgaria, amo ng other places.

The conversation turned back to what he was doing at the royal wedding: being a witness, documenting an important event. “The tradition in the Royal Collection is they commission artists to record events, be they happy or sad,” Mr. Creswell said.

He mentioned the painter and printmaker John Piper, who was appointed an official war artist in World War II. “There are millions of photographs” of London during the blitz, “but the idea is you get something more than the literal truth of the event.”

Half a century later, it was Mr. Creswell's turn to document a gloomy moment in British history, the devastating fire at Windsor Castle in 1992, the year Queen Elizabeth called “an annus horribilis.”

What if there had been an official artist in Las Vegas in August to document the party at which, judging by cellphone videos that turned up on the celebrity Web site TMZ, Prince Harry lost more than his shirt at strip billiards?

< p>“I would have done a much better job than an iPhone,” said Mr. Creswell, who is 55, “but I'm too old to go to that kind of a party, I suspect.”