What lies beneath
Alexander Painting by Charlotte Johnson Wahl oil on canvas
ALEXANDER, a floppy- and fair-haired, casually dressed, relaxed young man, is painting. His whole life is before him, and why wouldn’t his artist mother catch the moment, paint him in the prime of youth, before he is old and grey?
But, hang on. Isn’t he the spitting image of Boris Johnson? He IS Boris Johnson — Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. His family and childhood friends call him Al or Alexander but the world knows him as Boris, and here he is, Charlotte Johnson Wahl’s eldest son. And though he’s now 55, he’s still blond. Amazing.
As is the life he’s led: born in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, baptised Catholic, and later confirmed into the Church of England, he says his faith comes and goes. After
Eton and Oxford, he was journalist, editor, politician, mayor of London and now UK prime minister. He married in 1987 and in 1993, just 12 days after that marriage was annulled, he married again. Four children — two daughters, two sons — an affair, another affair, a daughter in 2013, a divorce and earlier this year an engagement sum up a busy life.
Did he keep up the painting? He claims he did. And to relax, he also makes buses from old wooden crates. Figure that one out. But a sketch he did of a London bus did fetch £8,000 last year at a charity auction.
“As a kid,” Boris has said, he “was extremely spotty, extremely nerdy and horribly swotty.” When his mother painted this portrait, the spots had disappeared; he knew nothing of his colourful future but this privileged lad looks up at us, à la Princess Diana, with a very confident expression befitting his background.
And though Johnson Wahl’s father had a first in classics from Oxford and was later knighted, and her mother was the daughter of a Lithuanian professor of palaeography at Princeton, her own life was troubled.
Born Charlotte Fawcett, she married environmentalist Stanley Johnson at 22, had Boris, Rachel, Leo and Jo, graduated from Oxford when Boris was a baby, moved 32 times, home-schooled her children, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s aged 40, suffered from OCD and depression, and was terrified of dirt.
She had little or no formal training; aged five she had been given a set of oil paints and years later during a spell in a psychiatric hospital she became a prolific painter. She made 78 paintings during her time there and, when they were exhibited, it was a sell-out. Though Johnson Wahl has painted portraits of Jilly Cooper and Jonathan Miller and her now famous son, she considers personal publicity “incredibly vulgar”, says her daughter Rachel.
The ‘Wahl’ is from her 1988 marriage to American academic Nick Wahl. They lived in New York; he died in 1996. Johnson Wahl’s paintings record her marriage, motherhood and mental breakdown; at 77 one of her most interesting paintings is still this portrait of You-can-call-me-Al Boris, whom she calls her “soft-hearted” son. Isn’t a mother’s love a blessing?