Bhumibol Adulyadej
1927–2016 · King of Thailand and amateur painter linked to Expressionism
Bhumibol Adulyadej (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1927 – Bangkok, 2016) was King of Thailand from 1946 until his death, and is known as Rama IX. He is remembered above all as a monarch, but he also worked as an amateur painter whose work is associated with Expressionism. He matters to the history of painting as a sovereign who pursued visual art as a personal practice and who showed his paintings in public.
He was born in the United States, but he spent much of his childhood in Switzerland, where his mother took the family in 1933, after a brief period of schooling in Bangkok. He studied in Lausanne, where his first sustained engagement with images was photography. In 1934 he received his first camera, a hobby he kept for the rest of his life. The sources do not date the start of his painting, so no firm date should be given.
After his elder brother, Ananda Mahidol, died in 1946, he came to the throne, though he continued his training in Switzerland, taking up law and political science. His formal coronation took place in 1950, a few days after his marriage to Sirikit Kitiyakara. Through his reign, his institutional duties absorbed most of his time, and his artistic activity developed alongside them.
His painting is best documented through a special exhibition held at the National Gallery in Bangkok in 1982, marking the Rattanakosin bicentennial and running from 1 April to 30 June that year. The available sources do not describe his series, techniques or subjects in detail, so his style can only be characterised in general terms as expressionist, with a personal approach far removed from professional art circles.
His creative output went well beyond painting. From 1942 he played the saxophone with a keen interest in jazz, and he published illustrated and photographic books, including a collection of photographs documenting national development (1992), My Country Thailand (1995), several editions of The Story of Mahajanaka, and The Story of Tongdaeng (2004). These works reflect a way of thinking about images and storytelling that joined the eye of the photographer with that of the draughtsman.
His legacy is inseparable from his reign, the longest of any Thai monarch, and from the deep reverence he inspired in Thailand. As a painter his contribution is modest and little known outside his country. Even so, his exhibitions and books stand as evidence of a creative life that unfolded alongside one of the longest monarchies in Asia.