The first official portrait of the King was unveiled this week, and reactions have fallen within the usual range: it’s great, or it’s satanic, or it’s actually all about racism. Depicting public figures has always been a risky business. Graham Sutherland’s portrait of Winston Churchill was hidden from view and burned. Horatio Greenough’s statue of George Washington got up as a scantily clad Olympian deity was thought ludicrous. And Saied Dai’s official portrait of Theresa May was grudgingly accepted as a triumph.

People are happy to debate a royal portrait’s merit, but few would question why it was commissioned in the first place. Monarchs have their portraits painted: it goes with the territory. In painting Charles III, artist Jonathan Yeo joins a tradition of Caroline portraiture stretching back to Anthony van Dyck’s 1638-9 portrayal of Charles I. Yet he does so at a strange time.

The days when monarchs could rely on coinage, statuary and paintings to curate their image are long gone. Photography, television and the smartphone have seen to that. An age in which we can make and edit pictures with ever-increasing ease has also, coincidentally or not, seen the death of deference. And so memes about the royal hands are ubiquitous, the depiction of Charles in The Simpsons has enjoyed a long cultural afterlife, and Netflix dramas speculate about his youthful amours. Given that a king has never had less control over how he is seen, some might wonder why a monarch in 2024 would bother to have his portrait painted in the first place.

After all, what can a mere portrait do against such fearful odds? Quite a lot, it seems. X is teeming with hot takes. Art historians are being invited onto TalkTV. Not to be outdone, the New York Times has run multiple pieces about an oil painting of a foreign country’s head of state. Yeo’s painting must have been seen by more people in the 24 hours since it was unveiled than van Dyck’s was in the first decade of its existence. Cameras are supposed to have superseded pigment and turps, yet the cultural heft of a new royal portrait seems weightier than ever.

Much of the coverage focuses on the painting’s supposed edginess. It’s true that the picture is very red. It’s also true that van Dyck would be mystified by the composition, where the King’s head and hands float above a leaf litter of reds, oranges and indigos. But in other respects the conventions of royal portraiture are adhered to. Charles is uniformed as Regimental Colonel of the Welsh Guards, and although the torso is an impressionistic sketch, the eye is still drawn to the regal gongs studding his tunic. Van Dyck chose to paint Charles I on horseback; at the King’s suggestion, Yeo added a monarch butterfly as a mawkish symbol of transformation.

Nevertheless, the portrait’s real lure has little to do with its aesthetic value. It fascinates because it shows us what we cannot have. The barrier to entry for a professional portrait is significant, and money is not the only problem. We accept that a king or prime minister or celebrated poet will have their portrait painted, and in our heart of hearts we know that having a portrait painted of ourselves would not be the same thing at all. The kind of public portraiture embodied by Yeo’s picture is the last redoubt of true exclusivity, accessible only through accident of birth (royals), luck (prime ministers), or genius (celebrated poets).

Less than 48 hours after it was unveiled, King Charles’s first official portrait has already done its job. It has projected the monarch’s likeness far beyond our own little island and, in its own subtle way, emphasised the unbridgeable gap between Crown and subject. There are those who have their portraits painted, and those who go to galleries to see them. Why would a king bother to have his portrait painted in 2024? Because, for the right sitter, portraits work as well as they ever did — if not better.