Cara Delevingne is no stranger to seeing her image plastered on billboards around the world – but she’s not so familiar with seeing it hanging in an art gallery. Until now.

We don’t know if Cara was smiling while she posed for the British artist Jonathan Yeo, but she must definitely be proud now, knowing that her portraits are hosted in the Danish Museum of Natural History.
Cara Delevingne, with the lion tattoo on her finger and the thick eyebrows, seen as a muse. This is an opportunity to see how a painter uses his brushes and different styles, just like changing filters on Instagram, to create different portraits. The Delevingne portraits appear as a kind of show-within-a-show in the context of a larger retrospective. They are the result of an experiment whereby Yeo set out to create a series of portraits of one person showing different sides of their personality. Yeo said Delevingne proved the “perfect subject and muse” for his exploration of the creation and manipulation of identity through social media. 

When Delevingne first began to tease the portraits on her Instagram, her four posts drew upwards of 2,473,000 likes and 5,700 comments. “It’s exciting for my job because it means people are much more tuned in to images,” Yeo says. “It also means artists, and especially portrait artists and photographers, really have to up their game now because we have a much more sophisticated audience and they’ll be expecting images that have layers of narrative and meaning to them. We’re going to move into a very exciting period for this sort of thing.”

“Jonathan Yeo Portraits” at The Museum of National History, Frederiksborg Castle, Denmark, opens on March 20 and runs through June 30.

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