LONDO: Britain’s Prince William and his wife Kate released a new official portrait of their son George on Friday to celebrate the young prince’s upcoming fourth birthday.
George, the great grandson of Queen Elizabeth and third-in-line to the throne, was pictured with a beaming, toothy grin as he posed in a stripy blue shirt in the photo which was taken last month.
William and Kate, who are officially known as the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, returned to England with George and his sister, two-year-old Princess Charlotte, on Friday after five-day tour of Poland and Germany ahead of his birthday on Saturday.
“The Duke and Duchess are very pleased to share this lovely picture as they celebrate Prince George’s fourth birthday, and would like to thank everyone for all of the kind messages they have received,” William’s office said in a statement.
Prince George. AP
William and Catherine rounded off their continental tour with a visit to Germany’s northern port city of Hamburg.
Images captured in the capital Berlin showed the Duke and Duchess making their way to a platform at the Central Station on the morning, before boarding a train bound for Hamburg on Friday, Efe news reported.
The couple were coming to the end of a five-day visit that included the young Prince George and Princess Charlotte and took them to neighbouring countries Poland and Germany.
Their first stop in Hamburg was the Maritime Museum, where they were greeted by hordes of onlookers clutching Union Jacks and German flags.
The royals were visiting the museum as part of celebrations marking a shared UK-German year of science, according to a Buckingham Palace statement.
The Duke and Duchess then visited the Elbphilharmonie concert hall, where a band of window cleaners had been spotted scaling its facades earlier in the day.
One of the world’s largest concert halls, the venue opened in January this year, and hosted the royals for a special Hamburg Symphony Orchestra performance.
From there, the pair took a boat along the Elbe River to Hamburg’s Airbus base — the final stop of the royal tour — where the couple were set to meet German and British apprentices and see the final assembly line of an A320 aircraft.
They were then set to depart for Britain, drawing the tour to a close.
