What Happens When a Sitter Hates Their Portrait?
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.
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 anathema. Why on earth do we still paint portraits? If you look at the photographs of Kate, on which my portrait was based, you see that I’ve changed an awful lot. There is a balance of realism and going beyond to something more mysterious. There is a consideration of the structure of the face, drawing out what’s distinctive about the face, the sense of mystery, timelessness, quiet.”
The negativity he received was nowhere near as violent as that Sarah Boardman experienced but, still, “the response was a surprise. My previous portraits had been well received, which made the reaction hard to understand. It was a difficult time. There seemed to be a kind of hysteria in the media and on social media. There was no attempt on the part of the critics to understand how the portrait fitted in with the rest of my work.”
Portraits are inherently a celebration of a life, but whose vision of that life? Graham Sutherland’s portrait of Winston Churchill so offended the prime minister that he had it destroyed, and Peter Hurd may best be remembered for President Lyndon Johnson’s verdict on his portrait (“the ugliest thing I ever saw”). Everyone wants to be younger or trimmer, with a less prominent nose and fuller lips.
Parents may sometimes be difficult clients when commissioning portraits of their children—painter John Singer Sargent was once asked why he completely redid the face of a young woman 15 times, answering, “She had a mother”—and especially if the portrait is posthumous. In that case, the artist will need to work solely from photographs, and different people may have competing images they want represented in the final work. Jennifer Welty, a painter in Santa Cruz, California who specializes in portraits of children, said that a problem for her is that a finished portrait may take as long as a year, during which time the looks of the young subject may change significantly. Taller, thinner, suddenly pubescent. “I have to discuss this all with the parents so that they understand that the painted image doesn’t grow older with the child,” she said.
With older subjects—the politician, the university president, the chairman of the board, the foundation director—the portraitist will need to know at what age the subject will be depicted and what aspects of the individual are to be brought out, such as dressed in a business suit or in a golf shirt. Portrait subjects generally want to be depicted as they looked when they started the job, not when they are leaving it. Marc Mellon, a portrait sculptor in Redding, Connecticut, stressed the need to determine “who is approving the commission from the get-go: Is it a committee? Is it the head of the company, or is it the widow?” That wisdom came to him the hard way, after he was commissioned to create an eight-foot-tall statue of Dr. Alton Oxner, after whom the Ochsner Medical Center in New Orleans, Louisiana, was named and which had commissioned the posthumous statue. A committee composed of medical center directors provided Mellon with a series of photographs of Dr. Oxner, most of which were taken toward the end of his life.
The committee approved both the small-scale and full-size models of the statue, and Mellon was ready to go to casting when the doctor’s widow “came to my studio to look at the sculpture.” She wasn’t happy with the work and asked how he had picked that pose and that expression, at which point the artist showed her the photographs he had been given. “‘Oh, I’m going to give you better photographs,’” she said, and supplied Mellon with pictures of her husband taken 20 years earlier, looking younger and more vital. The changes that needed to be made were extensive, not only to the head, “but also to the whole carriage,” he said. “A man in his 60s holds himself very differently than one in his 80s.” Fortunately, “adjustments were made in the budget” to pay for the changes.
Nothing says luxury and extravagance as much as a portrait, and the people who commission one are almost invariably wealthy. The clients may be the CEOs of large corporations, foundations or universities, or are to the manner born, and they are accustomed to giving orders that underlings must carry out. “Occasionally, I get treated like the plumber coming to unclog the toilet,” said Jim Pollard, a portrait artist in Cazenovia, Wisconsin. Many artists describe an unspoken tug-of-war with their clients, both sides outwardly looking to please but each wanting to assert control over the process and final image. “Ultimately, I am an artist, and I’m painting what I see, which may not be exactly what the person commissioning me wants to see,” Welty said. “I’ve asked people, ‘Why did you hire me?’” She noted that some people think of a painted portrait as though it were a selfie, where one can make instant changes on a cell phone. “You can’t make major changes with a flick of a paintbrush.”
Portrait artists not only need artistic skills but also a great deal of people skills, the type that psychologists often need to develop. Australian painter Paul Newton recalled “unveiling a portrait to an important client in New York. The subject and his wife attended and were very happy with the portrait overall, but in their words, there was ‘something not quite right about the mouth’. I immediately thought of Sargent and felt like I was in good company. I told them I would be more than happy to tweak the mouth to get it right. I remember they stood back several meters from the painting, which was on a display easel. I mixed up some paint on my palette, and before beginning the process, I described to them in detail what I was proposing to do. They nodded their assent, and I walked up to the canvas to place my first brushstroke. As my brush touched the canvas, they said ‘Stop, that’s it, you’ve got it!’ To this day, I’m still not sure whether I actually applied any paint to the canvas, but they seemed happy with the result. The gallery director and I exchanged a smile. My takeaway from that was that sometimes people just want to feel like they are being heard.”
Finding a good fit in a portrait artist requires more than just Googling those words. Many artists are found by clients who see their work in friend’s or associate’s homes. Not long after President George W. Bush left office, he and his wife were invited by old friends Annette and Harold Simmons to dinner at their home in Dallas. The dinner celebrated both Harold Simmons’ successful kidney transplant and the Bushes’ reemergence as private citizens and residents of Dallas, but the conversation turned to the nearby Southern Methodist University, where a school of education was being built and named for Annette (based on the Simmons’ $20 million gift to the university in 2007) and where the former president was setting up a presidential library. Annette mentioned a portrait was being painted of her by John Howard Sanden, which was to be displayed inside the education school, and the subject piqued the interest of the Bushes, who were looking for someone to paint his official White House portrait. President Bush asked “Is he easy to work with?” and she offered profuse praise of Sanden. Within a few weeks, a staffer in the Bush presidential library emailed Sanden about coming to meet the former president. The resulting portrait now hangs in the White House in the Great Hall where all the presidential portraits are displayed.
“Is he easy to work with?” is likely to be a question on a lot of people’s minds, but it may mean a range of things. Will sitting for a portrait take up a lot of my time? Will the artist take suggestions or make changes? Will the artist make me look younger? Who will win this tug-of-war? John Singer Sargent defined a portrait as “a picture of someone who has something wrong with his mouth”—meaning that people are often dissatisfied with their mouth, ears, nose or other features and take it out on the artist painting their portrait. Raymond Kinstler (1926-2019) claimed that one of his most difficult sitters was actress Katharine Hepburn, because “she was very opinionated. She had very strong ideas about her persona and questioned me about every brushstroke. I would carefully explain what I’m doing, but at one point she told me, ‘You talk too much. Why don’t you paint a little more?’”
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