Queen Ntombi Twala of Swaziland Royal Edition (F. & S. II.346A)
Queen Ntombi Twala of Swaziland Royal Edition (F. & S. II.346A)
Signed Print
Andy Warhol
100 x 80cm, Edition of 30, Screenprint, 1985
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Meaning & Analysis
Queen Ntombi Twala of Swaziland Royal Edition (F. & S. II.346A) is a 1985 screenprint by Andy Warhol from the Reigning Queens series, showing the Swazi queen in a frontal portrait against an orange ground. Her face is printed in red with turquoise highlights beneath a dark headdress with a lavender fringe. It is a Royal Edition, signed, in an edition of 30.
The Reigning Queens portfolio of 1985 took as its subjects four women who held royal office at the time: Queen Elizabeth II, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark and Queen Ntombi Twala of Swaziland. The European portraits depend on tiaras, pearls and orders. The portrait of Queen Ntombi is built from different regalia and a different palette.
She wears a rounded, dark headdress ringed by a lavender fringe, a white beaded collar with red geometric motifs, and a wrap of red, orange and green. Warhol prints the skin in deep red, with turquoise highlights across the forehead, cheeks, nose and chin. This reverses the pale flesh tones of the European portraits and makes this the most colour-saturated of the four. A yellow vertical bar on the left and an angled pink block on the right, carrying a drawn knot, break the orange field in the way the geometric blocks do elsewhere in the series.
The A suffix in the Feldman and Schellmann catalogue denotes the Royal Edition, published in a signed edition of 30, therefore among the most restricted prints in the series.
