Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s Son Archie Became Obsessed With a Painting at Tyler Perry’s House With an Eerie Connection to Princess Diana: ‘Gives Me Chills’
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s transition to their current home in Montecito, California, included a 2020 stay at Tyler Perry’s Beverly Hills mansion. And, as it turns out, a bizarre experience involving a painting, their son, Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor, and Princess Diana. Ahead, how now-3-year-old’s obsession with a piece of art had an eerie connection to the Duke of Sussex’s late mother.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s son Archie found a certain painting at Tyler Perry’s house ‘especially interesting’
When the Duke and Duchess of Sussex left Canada as coronavirus (COVID-19) lockdowns loomed in March 2020, they headed for California to stay in Perry’s Beverly Hills mansion. According to Spare, Harry’s memoir that debuted in January 2023, the property had been sitting empty when the media mogul offered it to Harry and Meghan.
Described by Harry as “xanadu,” Perry’s home was “palatial” with “high ceilings, priceless art,” and a “beautiful swimming pool.” Most importantly, however, it was “ultra-safe” with Perry footing the bill for security.
Meghanintroduced their young son “to everything” in the house. “Look at this statue! Look at this fountain! Look at these hummingbirds in the garden!” A painting in the foyer captured Archie’s eye. Only a few months shy of his first birthday, Archie found it “especially interesting.”
“He started every day locked on it. A scene from ancient Rome,” Harry wrote, before adding he and Meghan “asked each other why” but had “no clue.”
Archie went to the painting shortly after taking his first steps when Harry and Meghan realized it had a connection to Princess Diana
A few months after their arrival at Perry’s house, long after it had begun to feel like “home,” Harry and Meghan got an answer on Archie’s obsession with the painting. Their son had taken his first steps in the garden and “not long after” Archie “went marching up to his favorite painting in the front hall.”
“He stared at it, made a gurgle of recognition,” Harry wrote, noting when Meghan “leaned in for a closer look” she saw “a nameplate on the frame. Goddess of the hunt, Diana.”
Harry continued, saying when they’d told Tyler about what happened he didn’t know about the painting’s connection to Diana. “He’d forgotten the paining was even there,” Harry wrote. “Gives me chills,” the Don’t Look Up star said to which Harry and Meghan replied, “Us too.”
Elton John saw Princess Diana in Archie, according to ‘Spare’
The connections to Diana didn’t stop with the painting at Perry’s house. Harry also revealed in his memoir his late mother’s friend, Elton John, seemed to see Diana in Archie. During a 2019 stay at the “Tiny Dancer” singer’s home in France, Harry noticed him “studying Archie’s face.”
“Often I’d catch Elton studying Archie’s face and I knew what he was thinking: Mummy. I knew because it happened so often to me as well,” Harry wrote. “Time and again I’d see the expression cross Archie’s face and it would bring me up short.”
The 38-year-old continued, saying he almost mentioned to John “how much I wished my mother could hold her grandson, how often it happened that, while hugging Archie, I felt her — or wanted to. Every hug tinged with nostalgia; every tuck-in touched with grief.”
