Kate Middleton Played Docent at the Oman Banquet — and the Paintings Were the Real Diplomacy
Everyone covered the yellow gown. The diplomacy was hanging on the wall of the Green Drawing Room.
“These are two of my own paintings.”
King Charles said it in the Green Drawing Room at Windsor Castle on Tuesday afternoon, standing before the Sultan of Oman with two framed watercolors of the Sultan’s own country. The Sultan nodded. “Good.”
The two works, “Barren Landscape, The Escarpment – Jiddat al-Harasis” and “Mountainous Desert Landscape, Wadi Mu’aydin From Sayq,” date to 1995, painted when Charles was Prince of Wales on tour in Oman. They’d never appeared in a Royal Collection display during a state visit he hosted until this one. He told the room he had to work “very quick.”
The Princess of Wales has an art-history degree from St Andrews, class of 2005, and she put it to use. “These were painted by His Majesty,” she told guests. “He’s a very good watercolourist.” She added: “His Majesty, when he goes on different tours, will take an artist to come with him.”
It’s a real program. Buckingham Palace gave the King’s tour artists their own exhibition in the summer of 2025, and the stories are stranger than the paintings: in 1986 one of them, Martin Yeoman, was arrested as a suspected spy while sketching in the shade of an Omani police station. Charles drew up the shortlist himself.
A tiara that Sayyid Sa’id, Sultan of the Omani Empire from 1806 to 1856, sent to Queen Victoria in 1838 as a coronation gift was part of the same display. So was a book presented to Victoria in 1875, and teas modeled on Omani kahwa: cardamom, rose, dates. A century and a half of exchange, arranged in one room.
The US-Iran war has been running since late February. The Strait of Hormuz is choked, and Oman has been carrying messages between Washington and Tehran ever since. At the evening’s banquet in St George’s Hall, before 160 guests, Charles toasted Muscat’s “noble efforts” to reopen the strait and Oman’s “enduring commitment as a trusted interlocutor to all parties” — its “constructive neutrality,” as he put it. This was the first state visit by an Omani ruler in 44 years, since Sultan Qaboos in 1982.
The evening still had its pageantry. Kate arrived in a butter-yellow Elie Saab gown with a keyhole cutout and integrated cape, the Lover’s Knot tiara on her head: her second tiara appearance of 2026, after three in 2025 and none in 2024, the year of her cancer treatment. On her wrist was the rarely seen Queen Mary’s diamond choker bracelet, a 1920s art-deco piece estimated at $340,000 to $440,000. Greg Williams took the couple’s portrait; their channels shared it first in black and white. During the King’s speech, livestream viewers spotted her skirt trapped under a chair leg. She stood up later without trouble, Hello! reported.
Wednesday, the visit’s final day, belonged to Downing Street, where the Sultan and the Prime Minister were due to sign a two-way investment agreement under the UK-Oman Sovereign Investment Partnership.
