Why Lucian gave downmarket Blair the brush-off...
HE WAS a titan of British art, producing a collection of unforgettable and sometimes unsettling portraits – with notable sitters ranging from Kate Moss to the Queen.
But when Lucian Freud was asked if he could capture Tony Blair’s likeness on canvas, he gave the former Prime Minister the brush-off.
Freud considered such a commission to be downmarket, a new biography suggests. The former Labour leader is said to have made an approach to the celebrated artist through a Cabinet ally.
William Feaver writes in his book, The Lives Of Lucian Freud: ‘When Labour came into power after the May 1997 Election, the newly appointed Lord Chancellor, Derry Irvine, who saw himself as a connoisseur, made overtures regarding a portrait of Prime Minister Tony Blair.
‘Lucian fended off that idea as being no better than the overtures concerning Princess Diana and those from Andrew Lloyd Webber and the newspaper tycoon Conrad Black proposing wife portraits.’
Outspoken Freud, who died in 2011 aged 88, was perhaps best known for his nudes. He famously painted a naked, pregnant Kate Moss in 2002 – and is also said to have tattooed the model’s lower back with two swallows.
A controversial portrait of the Queen, which was finally completed in December 2001, received criticism for portraying the Monarch in an unflattering way. Works by the artist, whose grandfather Sigmund was the founder of psychoanalysis, sell for huge sums. Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, a 1995 nude of a civil servant, fetched £42million in 2015.
Mr Blair, meanwhile, would have to wait a decade for his portrait. A work by artist Phil Hale was commissioned in the final months of his premiership and was unveiled in 2008.
Another was painted by Alastair Adams in 2011 – four years after Mr Blair left Downing Street – and hangs in London’s National Portrait Gallery.