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Sarah A. Boardman, the British artist whose 2019 portrait of U.S. President Donald Trump recently caused a furore when its subject called it “truly the worst,” says she “completed the portrait accurately, without ‘purposeful distortion,’ political bias, or any attempt to caricature the subject, actual or implied.”
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In her first interview since the incident, Boardman told Britain’s Guardian newspaper that, in the six years since she painted the portrait, she has “received overwhelmingly positive reviews and feedback,” but that since Trump’s comments last month, “that has changed for the worse.” She added it is threatening her career.
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Trump had said in a statement that the portrait, which until recently hung in the Colorado state capitol building in Denver, “was purposefully distorted to a level that even I, perhaps, have never seen before.”
He praised Boardman’s portrait of former president Barack Obama before adding: “She must have lost her talent as she got older.”
Trump portrait that he called ‘truly the worst’ is being taken down ‘immediately’
Boardman said that, while she acknowledged Trump’s right to comment, “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.”
In a 2019 interview with the Colorado Times Recorder, Boardman was asked if her personal feelings about Trump would have any effect on the portrait.
“Not at all,” she said at the time. “When I start to paint a portrait, it is the portrait, likeness, and ‘essence’ of the subject which I strive to portray. Any personal feelings about any subject are not relevant and are left outside the studio per my training to ‘leave those emotions at the door.’”
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Boardman’s website notes that she began studying techniques of the old masters in Germany in 1985 and built a successful career as an artist. She won a nationwide “call for artists” by Colorado’s state capital to paint the official portraits of Obama and Trump.
After Trump’s criticism of Boardman, his envoy Steve Witkoff confirmed that the White House had been sent a new work from Moscow, which was a gift from Vladimir Putin. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov called it a “personal gift,” while Witkoff described it as a “beautiful portrait” by a “leading Russian artist.”
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