David Cameron shows his murky side in official portrait - Times Online

David Cameron shows his murky side in official portrait - Times Online: "
Richard Brooks Arts Editor
      Portrait of Tory leader David Cameron by Jonathan Yeo, 2009, oil on canvas, 42"x72".

THE first official portrait of David Cameron shows him in gloomy colours rather than as a bright, bold figure to lead the country out of the Gordon Brown years. The portrait, commissioned for the Conservatives, is also remarkable for its depiction of a party leader, let alone a man banging on the door of No 10, standing in an open-necked shirt with both hands in his pockets.
“It’s a deliberately murky-coloured background from which he is emerging,” said the artist Jonathan Yeo. “We still don’t know much about Cameron as he is coming into our lives as a comparative unknown.”
Cameron, who became party leader four years ago, is usually regarded as an attractive family man who is slick on presentation.
Yeo, whose past portraits have included the Duke of Edinburgh, George W Bush, whom he deliberately insulted with a montage including porn, and Tony Blair, said:
“I was trying to capture a different sort of politician — one from my generation which has a look of informality and a bit of the rebellious sixth former.”
The artist, who has also painted portraits of Nicole Kidman, the actress, and Erin O’Connor, the model, was initially approached by a Tory donor, the businessman Andrew Sells, to paint Cameron. The portrait was to be auctioned in aid of the party, but now a significant percentage will go to Tickets for Troops, which gives injured British servicemen free entry to sports and music events.
Cameron went to Yeo’s west London studio five times over the past 18 months for sittings. The artist, who is the son of the former Tory minister Tim Yeo, was also allowed to follow the party leader around as well as sit in on some meetings.
Initially Yeo sketched a portrait of Cameron sitting down, but the Tory leader did not like it. According to Yeo, he was quite chatty as a sitter, discussing “sometimes politics, sometimes the music I was playing in the studio. And, of course, we did briefly discuss the death of his son earlier this year”.
Cameron last viewed the portrait a few months ago when it was near completion. “He seemed to like it,” said Yeo. However, his wife, Samantha, who studied art at university, has not yet seen it.
Spouses often have very strong views about the portraits of their other halves. Lady Churchill so hated the portrait of her husband Winston by Graham Sutherland that she burnt it; while Cherie Blair vetoed a planned portrait of her husband for the National Portrait Gallery because she disliked the proposed artist, Nicola Hicks."