Business Finance Media Technology Policy Wealth Insights Interviews

Art Art Fairs Art Market Art Reviews Auctions Galleries Museums Interviews

Lifestyle Nightlife & Dining Style Travel Interviews

Power Index Nightlife & Dining Art A.I. PR

About About Observer Advertise With Us Reprints

What Happens When a Sitter Hates Their Portrait?

From Winston Churchill to Ronald Reagan, the history of portrait painting is also a history of subjects who didn't like what they saw.

President Ronald Reagan was generally seen as easy-going; not so much his wife. When portrait artist Aaron Shikler (1922-2015) was asked to paint the official White House portrait of the then-former president, neither of them liked it. Shikler painted the president’s portrait three times, and each one was rejected—one was too large, one was too casual and one “they just didn’t like it”—and the commission was finally given to a different artist. It didn’t kill his career, though. His posthumous portrait of President John F. Kennedy hangs in the White House along with those of First Ladies Jacqueline Kennedy and Nancy Reagan, and he had also painted likenesses of U.S. senators, Supreme Court justices, cabinet officers, socialites and people who simply had a lot of money.

Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter

Thank you for signing up!

By clicking submit, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime.

Still, no one enjoys being rejected. Just ask Sarah Boardman, who painted a portrait of President Trump that was briefly hung in the Colorado State Capitol. President Trump didn’t like it and said so, but his followers were truly vitriolic in their scorn. Admittedly, it wasn’t a great likeness, but the hatred directed at the artist was remarkable. Her website does not list where she lives, and she would not discuss the circumstances at all. “I have had so much negativity from the whole debacle that I am not entering into that fray again,” she said in an email.

Someone who would talk about his experience is Paul Emsley, whose portraits of author V.S. Naipaul and former South African anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela hang in London’s National Portrait Gallery. However, his 2013 portrait of Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, was the subject of withering scorn by critics and others on both sides of the Atlantic after it was first displayed at the National Portrait Gallery. One writer in the Guardian referred to the portrait’s “sepulchral gloom,” while another in the Daily Telegraph likened the painting to a “mawkish book illustration.” It scarcely matters that Prince William called the portrait “just amazing” and “absolutely beautiful,” an assessment with which his wife agreed. Perhaps they were just being polite.

Emsley, too, claimed that “I like to think I’m polite, considerate of the feelings of the sitter”—he met with Kate Middleton four times before completing the portrait, talking with and taking photographs of her, and just looking at her—but he also asserts the right to be an artist. “In the age of photography, portrait painting is almost........

© Observer