With the Diamond Jubilee festivities in London only weeks away, a touring exhibition of portraits of Queen Elizabeth II has opened at the National Portrait Gallery (May 16).

"The Queen: Art & Image", showcases some fifty-five images, spanning 60 years of the monarch's reign.

According to curator Paul Moorhouse the gallery took the rather unconventional approach by selecting a range of official portraits, works by modern artists and media photographs.

SOUNDBITE: Curator at the National Portrait Gallery, Paul Moorhouse, saying (English):

"We wanted to say something about how the Queen has been represented and how this mysterious figure - the Queen - has taken shape in our imagination and what role images have had in that process."

The exhibition documents the changing representations of The Queen throughout the decades.

From 1950s traditional depictions to the more intimate images of the 1960s through to this work by Lucian Freud from 2001.

SOUNDBITE: Curator at the National Portrait Gallery, Paul Moorhouse, saying (English):

"During the course of the exhibition, which covers 60 years, you see the way the Queen has been represented really changing in radical ways. At the beginning of the exhibition, you see very, very formal images, very deferential images, but as you move through the exhibition, you see the story changing the Queen being represented in a more informal way and times, in a very, almost disrespectful way and then moving to the present day, a range of contemporary responses such as this one by Thomas Struth, which represent the Queen as she is now, often in quite surprising ways, again."

Moorhouse began putting the exhibition together almost four years ago.

Other highlights include pieces by Pietro Annigoni, Andy Warhol and Thomas Struth.

The Exhibition comes to London after a tour of Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff.

Kathi Urban, Reuters