Last month, Queen Elizabeth II became the UK’s longest reigning monarch, beating the record set by her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria—so you’d think that royalists would have been falling over themselves to buy this striking 1996-97 portrait of the monarch and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, by the artist Tai-Shan Schierenberg. But the piece fetched just $5,250 when it went under the hammer in August at the New Jersey-based auction house Nye & Company. “It’s no masterpiece, and the Duke looks unnervingly like Bobby Charlton, but I liked it, and at six foot by five foot thought it was an impressive enough thing,” says the art commentator Bendor Grosvenor. He thought it was his “patriotic duty” to bid, but forgot in the end (there goes the knighthood, he quips).