Trump and the perilous politics of presidential portraits
Trump takes a proprietorial view of his own image. He sells pictures of himself which he likes and spurns those he does not like, even if it means offending his own supporters.
For centuries ‘portrait diplomacy’ was an important feature of relations between nations and their elites. Without a face-to-face meeting an image was the only way of telling what someone looked like. Pictures were exchanged as gifts, especially when a betrothal or marriage was under consideration. Henry VIII famously felt that his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, did not live up in the flesh to the likeness commissioned from his court painter Hans Holbein.
There has been no need to rely on an artist’s interpretation since the arrival of photography. In this digital age, still and moving pictures are ubiquitous. People meet each other in vision over the internet and flick selfies left or right on dating apps.
Painted portraits, busts and statues have kept their value as luxury items, particularly as ways to pay tribute to the powerful. The more self-regarding and autocratic they are, the more sensitive they seem to be about the way they are depicted. Some portraits of the famous that were intended to flatter have instead caused offence, and have consequently ended up stuffed away out of sight or even on bonfires.
Donald Trump certainly knows what he likes and hates – and Russia’s president Putin knows how to play him. On his recent trip to Moscow, Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff was given a “beautiful portrait” of Trump, which Putin had commissioned. The US president was “clearly very touched” when Witkoff handed it over, he told Tucker Carlson.
Trump has favourite images of himself that he reproduces on merchandise for sale. Most recently, news photographers caught him in the spontaneous “fight, fight, fight” pose, fist raised, seconds after a would-be assassin’s bullet nicked his ear. He has also perfected the defiant mug shot taken by police after his arrest in Georgia. He liked it so much he copied it for his appearances in the dock in New York City and for his official 2025 Inauguration portrait.
“The Visionary”, a portrait Trump commissioned in 1989 when he was a property developer, is another presidential favourite. It hangs in pride of place in his Mar-e-Largo club/residence and is the picture Nigel Farage, Elon Musk and Nick Candy posed in front of in December.
Even this flattering image of the young Trump in cricket whites did not entirely please him, however. The artist Ralph Wolfe Cowan concentrated on the centre and sketched in the surroundings. “How much would it cost to put my other hand in?”, Trump asked. A good while later, he paid up the required $4,000. “He doesn’t have small hands, like people have said”, Cowan told Town & Country magazine, countering an offending claim put around by the editor of Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter.
The British-born artist Sarah Boardman has not been so lucky. Along with Jared Polis, the “Radical Left Governor” of Colorado, she has become a target of Trump’s online fury for her picture of him in the Hall of Presidents in the state capitol Denver. It was paid for by donations totalling $10,000, mainly from prominent members of Trump’s Republican party. The artist says she has shown him “thoughtful, non-confrontational, not angry, not happy, not tweeting.”
Clearly, Trump did not agree with her vision. On Truth Social last Sunday night, the president posted that it is “a bad picture…purposely distorted” and that “I would much prefer not having a picture than having this one”. The portrait has been up since 2019 and, other than his feud with the governor, it’s not clear exactly why it sparked Trump’s ire.
He is by no means the first prominent person to object to a portrait, however. President Teddy Roosevelt loathed his White House picture, saying it made him look like a “mewing cat”. Lyndon Johnson called his “the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen”. Ronald Reagan asked for his to be redone to put a twinkle in his eye.
Until Donald Trump refused to host an event for Barack Obama, presidents used to preside over the ceremonial unveiling of their predecessor’s official portrait. Trump is not likely to relent for Joe Biden. He and his team clearly fear the power of the image. At the Pentagon, the purge against DEI has led to images of women and ethnic minorities being stripped from the walls, including pictures of Colin Powell, the first black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Ira Hayes, a marine who raised the flag at Iwo Jima, and Jeannie Leavitt and Nicole Malachowski, the first female US fighter pilots.
The mining tycoon Gina Reinhart asked the National Gallery of Australia to remove a crude and unflattering picture of her from a series of portraits. Even distinguished artists have not escaped the wrath of their sitters. Sir Winston Churchill so hated the portrait by Graham Sutherland that was given to him by MPs for his 80th birthday that his loyal wife burnt it.
A rich New Yorker called Bernard Breslauer destroyed his portrait by the more famous Lucian Freud. Today it would be worth millions at auction. By contrast, the late British financier Jacob Rothschild liked Freud’s picture of him so much that he used to carry it in his hand luggage.
Lucian Freud painted Queen Elizabeth II as well. Being depicted multiple times by artists of varying quality goes with the job for monarchs and presidents. Mere commoners risk being accused of getting above themselves.
“The Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner has gifted a picture of HERSELF to the Prime Minister of Vietnam. What. On. Earth.”. The GB News presenter Alex Armstrong unfairly and inaccurately tweeted this response above a photograph of Rayner and a visiting dignitary holding her portrait. In fact, in a modern echo of the diplomatic niceties in the Tudor period, the Vietnamese deputy prime minister Nguyen Hoa Binh had commissioned the portrait, and gave it to Rayner “as a souvenir” of their meeting.
There are at least 15 distinguished portraits of the last Queen, although the one by the subsequently convicted sex-offender Rolf Harris has, understandably, been quietly forgotten. Neither she nor her successor tried to control the pictures they posed for. Recently Charles III deliberately welcomed the startling “red” first official portrait of him as King by Jonathan Yeo.
Going one better than Henry VIII, Trump takes a proprietorial view of his own image. He sells pictures of himself which he likes and spurns those he does not like, even if that means offending the state government and the sycophants who paid an artist to immortalise him on canvas.
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