Maybe you’ve seen it already: that portrait of former British Prime Minister Theresa May, standing stoic, a bit steely even, with a military-esque blue coat draped over her shoulders. One hand, with red-painted fingernails, rests across her body. The other peeks out from beneath the coat and holds a lily of the valley, part of whose Latin name means “the month of May.”
If you haven’t seen it, here it is, but also, you may be wondering who cares about a painting of May, the British prime minister three prime ministers ago. Official portraits of politicians are not unusual, and these commissions tend to be somewhat honorary affairs: a record for posterity of a person in public service who had power and used it.
But the unveiling this week of artist Saied Dai’s portrait — officially titled “The Rt Hon Theresa May MP” — revived a debate about who May was as a politician, before, during, and after her premiership. It initiated a parallel one about how to reconcile that history with her portrayal here, and whether this portrait reflected, remade, or somehow cauterized her tenure and the political tumult that came with it: May’s attempts to complete Brexit and all the political chaos that came after.
For Dai, the Tehran-born British artist who created the portrait, art isn’t conceived through the narrow prism of politics. That is the challenge of capturing a subject like May, or any other public figure: Our minds are probably made up. “You get an impression that people think that they know public figures,” Dai said.
This may be particularly true for May. She was Britain’s second female prime minister who won the impossible job of taking the United Kingdom out of the European Union. She tried, and still failed. To others, she was the Conservative leader who never really wanted Britain to leave the EU and spent…
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