Artist of portrait that wound up Trump says her business may never recover

The artist whose work Donald Trump really wasn’t a fan of has strongly denied she set out to make him look bad.

Sarah Boardman, whose painting of him hung in the Colorado State Capitol until he demanded it was removed, said her business may never recover from the controversy.

Trump, 78, was annoyed because he felt she had painted his predessecor Barack Obama in a more flattering light.

‘He looks wonderful’, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. ‘But the one on me is truly the worst.’

In a statement on her website, British artist Ms Boardman said she had been inundated with requests to comment on the issue but would only give one response.

She said that for the six years the portrait hung in place, ‘I received overwhelmingly positive reviews and feedback. Since President Trump’s comments, that has changed for the worst.’

Defending her intentions as a painter, she said: ‘President Trump is entitled to comment freely, as we all are, but the additional allegations that I “purposefully distorted” the portrait, and that I “must have lost my talent as I got older” are now directly and negatively impacting my business of over 41 years which now is in danger of not recovering.’

When the portrait was unveiled in 2019, she said it had been called ‘thoughtful, non-confrontational, not angry, not happy, not tweeting. 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.’

But once he took office again, Trump did not agree and said he would rather have no portrait at all than this one, which was commissioned after a crowdfunded campaign from his supporters.

He accused the portrait of being ‘purposefully distorted to a level that even I, perhaps, have never seen before’.

‘Nobody likes a bad picture or painting of themselves’, he wrote on social media.

‘The artist also did President Obama, and he looks wonderful, but the one on me is truly the worst. She must have lost her talent as she got older.

‘In any event, I would much prefer not having a picture than having this one, but many people from Colorado have called and written to complain.’

Ms Boardman said the reference photograph as well as all of her subsequent ‘works in progress’ had been approved by the Colorado State Capitol Advisory Committee who commissioned the work.

She said: ‘I completed the portrait accurately, without “purposeful distortion,” political bias, or any attempt to caricature the subject, actual or implied.

‘I fulfilled the task per my contract.’

The issue may remind readers of an episode of The Crown in which Winston Churchill took such offence to a portrait of him marking his eightieth birthday that it was never displayed.

The painting, by Graham Sutherland, was presented to him in Parliament, but he hated it so much that it was eventually burnt in a garden, though accounts of exactly who burnt it differ.

‘I look like a down-and-out drunk who has been picked out of the gut­ter in the Strand’, Churchill is reported to have said. ‘It makes me look as if I were straining a stool [on the toilet].’

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