Not long after President George W. Bush left office, he and his wife were invited by old friends Annette and Harold Simmons to dine at their home in Dallas. The dinner was in celebration of both Harold Simmons’ successful kidney transplant and the Bushes’ reemergence as private citizens and residents of the city, but the conversation turned to the nearby Southern Methodist University, where a school of education was being built and named for Annette (based on the Simmons’ $20 million gift to the university in 2007) and where the former president was setting up a presidential library. Annette mentioned a portrait was being painted of her by John Howard Sanden, which was to be displayed inside the education school, and that subject pricked the interest of the Bushes because they were looking for someone to paint his official White House portrait. President Bush asked her about Sanden, “Is he easy to work with?” and she offered profuse praise. Within a few weeks, a staffer in the Bush presidential library emailed Sanden about coming to meet the former president. The portrait he painted now hangs in the White House in the Great Hall where all the presidential portraits are displayed.
‘Is he easy to work with?’ is not an artistic question, but it is likely to be a question on the minds of a lot of people who, for one reason or another, want a portrait painted, and it may mean a range of things: Will it take up a lot of my time? Will the artist take suggestions or make changes? The big muckamucks who get their portraits painted often are highly conscious of how they appear to other people, and they also may be used to giving orders they want obeyed. It’s highly unlikely they’re accustomed to artistic egos. Who is in charge of posterity anyway? The late artist Raymond Kinstler claimed that one of his most difficult sitters was actress Katherine Hepburn because “she was very opinionated. She had very strong ideas about her persona and questioned me about every brushstroke. I would carefully explain what I’m doing, but at one point, she told me, ‘You talk too much. Why don’t you paint a little more?’”
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Artists who accept commissions to paint portraits, no matter how esteemed they are in the realm of portraiture or in fine art generally, learn to put their egos aside. The sitter is always right, and they need to make life easy for that person. Grace DeVito, a portrait painter in Stamford, Connecticut, learned that lesson early, while studying illustration at New York’s School of Visual Arts and working as an illustrator for 11 years. “You work for an art director, and if he wants changes in the composition, okay, and if he wants different colors, okay,” she told Observer.
Changes in the illustration business that displeased her, particularly the trend toward creating everything digitally, led her to take a workshop with New York portrait artist Daniel Greene, a class in portraiture with Greene’s wife Wendy Caporale and, eventually, a series of portrait art classes with Laurel Boeck, after which portraiture became her career. Practicing at home meant posing her own children when they were young. “They were never happy to do it. There were a lot of bribes.”
Portraiture is seldom an artist’s first act
Portraiture is as old as art itself, but few painters start out as portraitists, though almost all receive considerable attention for the kind of realistic figurative work that’s translatable into portraiture. There really aren’t schools of portraiture, and most portrait artists did not study portraiture in school anyway. Instead, they tend to pick up techniques and ideas from observation and practice, sometimes attending non-degree ateliers that focus on drawing and painting the human figure. Raymond Kinstler began his artistic career as a comic book illustrator, later graduating to paperback book covers before moving on to nonillustrative subjects and portraiture, while portrait artist William Draper painted combat scenes as well as portraits of Admirals Halsey and Nimitz (“won me a lot of attention”) for the military during the Second World War.
Over the years, DeVito has painted portraits of a state supreme court judge, the mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts, the dean of a law school, various doctors and lawyers, as well as men, women, children and even pets, charging between $4,000 and $21,000 depending upon the medium (oil sketch or full oil painting) and the size of the artwork (full length, three-quarter-length, half-figure, head and shoulders and if hands are to be included in the image). If you want her to do your portrait, you can contact her directly or go through her agency, the Birmingham, Alabama-based Portraits, Inc., which works with dozens of portrait artists all over the country.
The agency gets all manner of clients, according to executive partner Jennifer Grey. “For family portraiture, sitters are typically younger children. We find ages 4-6 to be the most common age of sitter for family portraits. For institutional portraits, our most typical sitters are heads of corporations or academic leaders.” The institutional clients generally get charged the most, with prices reaching $150,000. All clients pay an up-front nonrefundable fee of half the negotiated price, with the remainder paid on acceptance of the finished work. She added that the typical length of time for the completion of a portrait is nine to twelve months.
Portraits, Inc. is the largest agency of its type, but it isn’t the only way that prospective clients find portrait artists or, more broadly speaking, artists willing to do a portrait. Sharon Sprung, a figurative painter who also does portraits, is usually contacted through her New York City gallery, Gallery Henoch. The gallery “typically” receives “a few requests for Sharon Sprung portraits each year. When requests seem appropriate, I pass them on to Sharon. She then decides whether she has the time and/or inclination to accept them,” George Schechtman, the gallery’s owner and director, told Observer.
One of those requests came from the White House, which commissioned Sprung to paint the official White House portrait of Michelle Obama. “The Obamas looked through many artists’ portfolios when they were trying to decide who would do their portraits,” she said. Sprung hadn’t submitted a portfolio to the White House Historical Association, which was founded by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy in 1961 and is a privately chartered organization that quietly solicits money for fine and decorative art acquisitions, including official portraits, at the White House as well as any refurnishing, but “the Obamas were aware of my work,” because she had painted portraits of certain members of Congress as well as deans and provosts at some universities.
She got the call and met with the First Lady three times at the White House in January 2021. Michelle Obama “didn’t have a lot of time to pose, because she was packing to leave the White House,” and their conversations were brief as “neither of us are that comfortable talking,” but Sprung took photographs, mixed some colors on the spot to find a match for Mrs. Obama’s skin tone and looked at the two dresses that the First Lady’s stylists had chosen. “I made the choice of which dress to show her in.”
Many artists in this field view themselves as fine artists who also do portraits, while others almost exclusively are portraitists (or they may create fine art but earn most or all of their living from portraiture). Y.Z. Kami, an Iranian-born artist who has lived in New York City since the 1980s, has had a different experience, earning a living early on as a portrait painter but increasingly creating works that, while looking like a portrait, are fine art pieces that he exhibits and sells via Gagosian. “People ask at Gagosian if I would do their portrait, and I have done portraits of a few collectors of my paintings,” he told Observer, but full-time portraiture now is in his rear-view mirror.
Sometimes, the fit between his fine art and commissioned portraiture is not as tight as collectors may want it to be. Kami noted that a collector of his paintings once came to his studio, seeking to have his portrait painted. “I was working on a series of large paintings for a show at Gagosian in London—they were all about eight-and-a-half feet high—and told the guy that I would get to his painting after I was done with this series. His painting took me two or three months, and when I showed it to him, he said it was too big. That’s just the way I was working at the time.” That was the one and only portrait rejection he ever experienced, “and I still have that work in my studio.” Rejection really isn’t something that exists in the fine arts—prospective buyers are purchasing something they’ve already seen—but it does (or can) happen in the portraiture field. Artist Mary Qian noted that last year a portraiture client was unhappy with the completed painting she had made. “Honestly, I don’t really know the exact reason. The client decided that he didn’t want a traditional portrait for some reason. I guess it’s not for everyone.” That’s one of the reasons that portrait artists collect half of the total payment up-front so that their time isn’t wasted fruitlessly.
The portrait-making process, from bathrobes to backgrounds
It is very rare for a sitter to be painted on the spot these days. Typically, a portrait artist shows up to take photographs, find an appropriate background for the image (a library, a garden, etc.), choose clothing and learn more about the subject. When Sanden visited President Bush for the first time, the former president met him at the front door wearing a bathrobe. “He told me, ‘I didn’t know what to wear,’” so the two men walked down the hall to look through his closet, and “I made the decisions about the suit,” which is “a middle-value gray suit, which was my preference, because a navy blue suit is not much fun to paint,” although the former president picked the tie (“it’s not the one I would have wanted, but it’s a color he wears a lot”). President Bush told the artist, “Don’t make my painting bigger than my father’s,” which Sanden already knew. From FDR on, almost every White House presidential portrait is 50” (tall) x 40” (wide). He also didn’t take any measurements of President Bush’s head because “every head in that room is 10.” White House presidential portraits are about tradition.
The chatting is important, because the artist’s goal is to get the subject to look animated. “You have to find ways to get them back to being the person who is going to be portrayed,” portrait artist Marc Mellon told Observer. A problem all portrait painters face is keeping their subjects alert during extended periods of posing. Gilbert Stuart, renowned for his portraits of George Washington, wrote that “a vacuity spread over his countenance” as soon as Washington began to sit. Many portrait subjects are older people who may become sleepy if they are required to sit inactively for extended periods of time. Other subjects simply feel uncomfortable with someone looking directly and intently at them. Some just get bored.
Knowing how to chat also helps these artists get business, and ambitious portrait artists tend to be social animals, attending parties where they might meet prospective patrons. “I think it helps to be personable and go to parties and get introduced,” Mellon said. “There was a client of mine who called me up and said that he was having a party. There were going to be some people there he’d like me to meet; was I free to come? I said, ‘Yes I am,’ without looking at my calendar. It’s just good business sense.”
Andy Warhol was well known for attending parties of the rich and famous, working the room and often coming away with portrait commissions and new clients. Other artists host get-togethers in their studios. “I like to hold a big party in the spring and invite everyone I know,” Draper said. “I don’t think of it as business, although I do deduct it.”
