On Sunday night, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that “Nobody likes a bad picture or painting of themselves.” Somewhat surprisingly, he then unleashed his most ferocious inner art critic and critically vaporized the portrait of himself hanging (among other presidential portraits) in Colorado’s State Capitol.
I immediately thought of the official 1954 portrait of Winston Churchill by Graham Sutherland, at that time arguably Britain’s best-known modern painter. To please her boss, who loathed the portrait, Churchill’s private secretary smuggled the painting to a secluded residence and, with the help of her brother, burned it. Churchill’s wife, Clementine, approved.
One wouldn’t wish such a fate on the Trump portrait in Colorado, which was painted by British-born artist Sarah A. Boardman, a resident of Colorado Springs.
But maybe Trump would? “I would much prefer not having a picture than having this one,” he posted, sounding like a boy who, on his ninth birthday, has unwrapped a slingshot glider with green stripes on its wings instead of the red he’d asked for.
End of carousel
Trump can take comfort in taking his place in a rich tradition of world-straddling statesmen whose self-image had been battered by artists they deemed inept. Theodore Roosevelt thought the White House portrait of him by French artist Théobald Chartran made him look like a “mewing cat.” After banishing it to a closet, he had it destroyed and replaced with something more to his liking.
Personally, I can’t see what Trump was getting at with his claim that Boardman’s portrait, on which she spent four months, was “purposefully distorted to a level that even I, perhaps, have never seen before.” Distorted? He’s a bit jowly, perhaps, but I — “even I?” — think it’s a decent resemblance.
Still, I agree with the president that it’s a bad portrait. Not because it’s distorted, but because it’s bland, wooden, slick and lifeless.
To be fair to Boardman, who is probably not much enjoying this moment (I’m not helping, I realize), she wanted her picture to match the style of the portraits of Trump’s 43 presidential predecessors already hanging in the Colorado Capitol. Until his death in 2003, these were painted by the artist Lawrence Williams.
For some time, there was nothing hanging where Trump’s portrait should have been. Then some pranksters, eager to make a political point, sneaked into the Capitol and placed a portrait of Russian president Vladimir Putin on an easel in front of that spot. (Coincidentally, last week U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff told Tucker Carlson that Putin gave him a “beautiful portrait” of Trump and asked him to take it to the White House.)
Republicans angered by the stunt set up a fundraising campaign and when they’d reached the $10,000 goal, they commissioned Boardman, who painted Trump’s portrait, as she had Barack Obama’s, in a style that would match the portraits by Williams.
“My portrait of President Donald Trump has been called thoughtful, non-confrontational, not angry, not happy, not tweeting,” Boardman said at the time. “In five, 10, 15, 20 years, he will be another President on the wall who is only historical background, and he needs to look neutral.”
Boardman’s notion that Trump should be made “to look neutral” could be what’s at issue here: I don’t think either his fans or his detractors ever want him to look neutral, or like someone who might one day blend into the background. But Trump himself loves to nurse a petty grievance, so Boardman’s troubles may equally have been kicked off by her naughty reference to portraying Trump “not tweeting.”
If Trump had said in his Truth Social post that “Nobody likes a bad portrait,” it would have been interesting. “Nobody likes a bad portrait” is a proposition that begs instant agreement. And yet when you reflect on it, it’s almost philosophical in its Escher-like complexity.
If we tried to fact-check “Nobody likes a bad portrait,” we’d presumably have to pull out some bad portraits and study the responses. And immediately, I guarantee it, we’d run into trouble. What is a “bad portrait”? Nobody would agree.
Is this one “distorted”? Does “distorted” equal “bad”? Do we prefer renaissance-style portraiture or 20th-century expressionism? Even if people could agree on what constituted “bad,” we couldn’t be sure no one would like it. If, for instance, it were a bad portrait of someone widely loathed (just spitballing), surely some people would like that?
But of course, what Trump really said was that no one likes a bad portrait of themselves. That’s a lot easier to fact-check. Accepting the inherent subjectivity of each case, we can admit that no, it’s not fun to see a portrait of yourself that you personally deem “bad.”
So kudos to the president. He has spoken the truth on at least two levels: The portrait is bad. Moreover, no one likes a portrait of themselves that they deem bad.
Take it back to Boardman, I say. Give her, just like the president, a second chance. What could go wrong?
