This cartoon, titled 'Coronation', by Cathy Wilcox was published in The Sydney Morning Herald on the 9th of May 2023. It is in landscape orientation, measuring 31 by 22 centimetres.
A sketched, full-colour caricature of King Charles III wears a disproportionately large gold and bejewelled crown atop his beleaguered head, characteristically large ears and sloping shoulders. The crown, covered in writing, fills almost all of the available white space. The image is cropped at his chin.
'Uneasy lies the head' is scrawled horizontally across the upper left-hand corner of the work. The king's cumbersome crown has a golden cross at its peak and a thick border of gold into which the text 'Pressure to live up to one's mother's impossible standards' is embedded across the top. The crown's purple velvet cap is unusually large and extends either side of his head.
Inside the oversized cap are nine phrases handwritten in peach, cream and violet like a collection of sentiments within a signed greeting card.
Clockwise from left, the phrases read:
'One waited so long for this now one is really quite tired'
'Centuries of violent colonisation'
'Memory of how one treated one's first wife'
'Awkward revelations from one's younger son and his wife'
'Icky reputation of one's brother'
'Record of wishing to be Camilla's tampon'
'Marrying one's mistress'
The last phrase reads: 'Sheer anachronistic extravagance of this whole inherited power wealth and privilege while many can't afford a place to live'
A vertical, wide, gold band with two green gemstones runs between the cross at the very top of the crown's purple cap, and another below. The gold band separates the phrases, four phrases on our left, five on our right. A white gem adorns the lower crosses' centre, and there are four large red stones, one in each of its posts.
Under the cap and either side of the lower cross rise two, gold, three-pronged, lily-shaped adornments. Tiny splashes of white suggest diamonds. They join a thick, horizontal, gold band – set with alternating, evenly spaced, purple and bright green stones – that wraps about the King's head. A muff of white fabric rests on his ears.
Black lettering on what would be the white ermine fur trim stands out, it reads 'emblem of slave trade', arrayed from ear to ear.
The large crown swallows the entirety of King Charles' forehead. The King faces us. His blue eyes are close-together and deep set, he has fluffy white and grey sideburns and his features are ruddy and flushed. Creases have formed on either side of his long nose and unsmiling lips.
His little, rounded shoulders are wrapped in gold, the colour of the crown.
In the bottom right-hand corner in the same hand, the artist has scrawled her name 'Wilcox'.
The label text for this cartoon reads: Australian cartoonists responded to the May 2023 coronation of King Charles III with a range of satirical takes on the expense and relevance of the British monarchy in modern times. In a Shakespearean allusion, Cathy Wilcox went one step further to include all the personal pressures on the new king as the leader of his family and the monarchy.
