Margaret Lindsay Williams was one of the most trusted portrait artists of the British Royal family and never showed anyone as ugly as they really were.

She was born in 1888 to Samuel Arthur Williams, a successful ship broker, and Martha Margaret Lindsay. Always an art kid, Margaret received private tutoring before attending Cardiff Technical College in Wales. She won a gold medal for art there and after a short stint at Pelham School of Art in London, Margaret hit the big time. She attended the Royal Academy where she shined like the star that she was. She won many awards and a traveling scholarship which took young Margaret to Italy and Holland for eighteen months per the advice of John Singer Sargent.

After she graduated, she was rolling in commissions from people like Queen Alexandra, Queen Mary, Princess Margaret, Queen Elizabeth II, David Lloyd George, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1916-1922, Henry Ford, and Warren G. Harding. Okay, so those commissions weren’t all straight out of school, but that doesn’t make them any less impressive. She also tried to convince David Lloyd George that she should be an official war artist when World War I broke out, but nobody would let her near the front lines, what with her being a woman and everything. She let it go and settled for illustrating a prose anthology to raise money for the troops.

She also painted the Royal Children but had a different technique for keeping them in one place than she had for the Royal Adults. She gave them dolls and toys, a strategy that generally worked, except for in the case of Prince Charles. According to Margaret Lindsay Williams’ unpublished memoirs that had been hidden long after Williams’ death, Prince Charles, who was four years old at the time, took one look at her palette and decided he wanted to be an artist. For one sitting, “he [even] arrived complete with overalls, his own box of paints, and a special book to paint in." This inspiration lasted forever and Prince Charles still paints to this day, unlike Margaret Lindsay Williams, who can’t because she died in 1960.