President Ronald Reagan was often seen as easy-going; not so much his wife. When artist Aaron Shikler (1922-2015) was asked to paint the official White House portrait of the then-president, none of them liked it. Shikler painted the portrait of the president three times, and each was rejected—one was too big, one was too loose and one “they just didn’t like”—and the commission was eventually given to a different artist. However, it did not kill his career. His posthumous portrait of President John F. Kennedy hangs in the White House along with that of First Ladies Jacqueline Kennedy and Nancy Reagan, and he also painted portraits of US senators, Supreme Court justices, cabinet officials, public figures and the wealthy.
However, no one enjoys rejection. Just ask Sarah Boardman, who painted a portrait of President Trump that briefly hung in the Colorado State Capitol. President Trump didn’t like it and said it, but his supporters were vitriolic in their disdain. Admittedly, it wasn’t the best, but the hate directed at the singer was remarkable. His website doesn’t say where he lives, and he wouldn’t discuss the circumstances at all. “I had such a bad time with the whole argument that I didn’t get into that argument anymore,” he said in an email.
Someone who can speak from his own experience is Paul Emsley, whose portraits of writer VS Naipaul and former South African anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela hang in London’s National Portrait Gallery. However, his 2013 portrait of Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, became the subject of scorn from critics and others on both sides of the Atlantic after it was first exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery. One Guardian writer referred to the image’s “grave gloom”, while another in the Daily Telegraph likened the painting to “a mawkish book illustration.” It doesn’t matter that Prince William called the photo “just amazing” and “absolutely beautiful,” an assessment his wife agreed with. Maybe they were well behaved.
Emsley, too, said “I like to think I’m polite, I consider the feelings of the person sitting”—he met Kate Middleton four times before completing this portrait, talking to her and taking pictures of her, and just looking at her—but he also asserts the right to be an artist. “In the age of photography, portraiture is almost a curse. Why on earth do we still paint portraits? If you look at Kate’s photos, on which my portrait was based, you can see that I have changed very badly. There is a balance of reality and I am moving towards something more mysterious. There is an abstraction of the structure of the face, an abstract painting of my face, which is peaceful, clear, clear and clear about my face.”
The negativity he received was nowhere near as violent as what Sarah Boardman experienced but, nevertheless, “the response was surprising. My previous pictures were well received, which made the reaction difficult to understand. It was a difficult time. There seemed to be a kind of confusion in social media and social media. There was no attempt on the part of the critics to understand how my image connects with my work.”
Photographs are a celebration of life by nature, but whose vision is that life? Graham Sutherland’s portrait of Winston Churchill so angered the prime minister that he destroyed it, and Peter Hurd may be best remembered for President Lyndon Johnson’s decision about his portrait (“the worst thing I ever saw”). Everyone wants to be slim or fit, have a flat nose and full lips.
Parents can sometimes be difficult clients when sending pictures of their children—artist John Singer Sargent was once asked why he completely retouched a young woman’s face 15 times, to which he replied, “She had a mother”—especially if the picture is posthumous. In that case, the artist will need to work only on images, and different people may have competing images that they want represented in the final work. Jennifer Welty, a Santa Cruz, California artist who specializes in children’s portraits, said her problem is that a finished portrait can take up to a year, during which time the look of a small subject can change dramatically. Tall, thin, suddenly pubescent. “I have to discuss all this with the parents so that they understand that the painted image does not age with the child,” she said.
With older subjects—a politician, a university president, a board chairman, a foundation director—the photographer will need to know what age the subject will be portrayed at and what personal features should be taken out, such as wearing a business suit or a golf shirt. Photo subjects usually want to be portrayed the way they looked when they started the job, not when they left it. Marc Mellon, a sculptor in Redding, Connecticut, emphasized the need to determine “who is authorizing the commission from the get-go: Is it the committee? Is it the head of the company, or the widow?” That wisdom came to him hard, after he was sent to make a portrait of Dr. The 8-foot-tall Alton Oxner, after whom the Ochsner Medical Center in New Orleans, Louisiana, was named, commissioned this obituary. A committee made up of directors of medical facilities gave Mellon a series of photographs of Dr. Oxner, many of which were taken near the end of his life.
The committee approved small and complete models of the statue, and Mellon was ready to go when the doctor’s widow “came to my studio to look at the sculpture.” He was not happy with this work and asked how he took that picture and that speech, at which time the artist showed him the pictures that were given to him. “‘Oh, I’ll give you the best pictures,'” she said, and handed Mellon pictures of her husband taken 20 years earlier, looking younger and more important. The changes that needed to be made were extensive, not only in the head, “but also in the whole car,” he said. “A man in his 60s behaves very differently than one in his 80s. Fortunately, “adjustments are made in the budget” to cover the changes.
Nothing says luxury and whimsy like a photo, and the people who post it are almost invariably wealthy. Clients may be CEOs of large companies, foundations or universities, or they may be natural born, and often give orders to subordinates. “Sometimes, I’m treated like a plumber coming to unclog a toilet,” says Jim Pollard, an artist in Cazenovia, Wisconsin. Many artists describe an unspoken tension with their clients, with both parties looking to please but each wanting to control the process and final image. “At the end of the day, I’m an artist, and I paint what I see, which may not be what the person sending me wants to see,” said Welty. “I’ve asked people, ‘Why are you hiring me?'” He noted that some people think of a painted image as a selfie, where one can make quick changes on a cell phone. “You can’t make big changes with the flick of a paint brush.”
Graphic designers need not only artistic skills but also a lot of people skills, the kind that psychologists often need to develop. The Australian painter Paul Newton recalled “unveiling the portrait to an important client in New York. The subject and his wife were present and very happy with the whole picture, but in their words, there was ‘something not quite right about the mouth’. I immediately thought of Sargent and I felt like I was going well. I told them that I would be very happy to assemble the mouth to put it back, which was made a few meters I remembered to paint it. I lifted the paint from my palette, and before I began the process, I explained to them in detail that what I was proposing to do, and I walked up to the canvas to put my first brushstroke, and they said ‘Wait, that’s it, you’ve got it!’ To this day, I’m still not sure I actually put any paint on the canvas, but they seemed happy with the result. The gallery director and I exchanged smiles. My take on that was that sometimes people want to feel like they are being listened to. “
Finding the right fit for a portrait artist requires more than just Googling those words. Many artists are discovered by clients who see their work in the homes of friends or colleagues. Shortly 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’ re-emergence as private citizens and citizens of Dallas, but the conversation turned to nearby Southern Methodist University, where a school of education was being built and named for Annette (based on Simmons’ $20 million gift to the university in 2007) and where the former president was establishing a library. Annette mentioned a portrait of herself painted by John Howard Sanden, which was to be displayed at the academy, and the subject piqued the interest of the Bushes, who were looking for someone to paint their official White House portrait. President Bush asked “Is he easy to work with?” and highly praised Sanden. Within weeks, an employee at the Bush presidential library emailed Sanden about meeting the former president. The resulting image now hangs in the White House in the Great Hall where all presidential portraits are displayed.
“Is he easy to work with?” may be a question on many people’s minds, but it can mean a number of things. Will sitting for a photo take up too much of my time? Will the artist take suggestions or make changes? Will the singer make me look younger? Who will win this fight? John Singer Sargent described the portrait as “a portrait of someone with something wrong in their mouth”—meaning that people are often dissatisfied with their mouth, ears, nose or other features and take it out on the artist who paints their portrait. Raymond Kinstler (1926-2019) said that one of his most difficult actors was the actress Katharine Hepburn, because “she had deep ideas.
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