Garry Shead's Coronation on the back cover of Garry Shead: Encounters with Royalty.

The Coronation (1996) is a wonderful example of Shead’s work from his iconic ‘Royal Suite’ series produced in the 1990s. The image is Sydney-specific with the Sydney Harbour Bridge resting in the dusk landscape of the background. The female figure prominent in this series is at first sight obviously Queen Elizabeth but, as the series was painted from the viewpoint of the artist as a twelve-year-old boy, the white goddess of the paintings could also be the artist’s mother. In The Coronation (1996) she appears particularly melancholy as her kangaroo crowns her, perhaps because she simultaneously looks to be both an alien within the landscape as well as a celestial apparition. 

The ‘Royal Suite’ paintings were forty years in the making, as Shead often focused upon the Royal visit to Australia of 1954.