At best it nods at expressionism, for there is little realism in the picture of a bee painted by Rishi Sunak on a visit to a North Yorkshire nursery school.
Cock-eyed and missing legs, the effort by Sunak attested to his schoolboy preference for maths over the arts. Yet the art of politics means he is not the first prime minister to pick up a paint brush and exploit the politics of art in the quest for votes.
Boris Johnson’s artistic output in office included a bee, a ladybird and a portrait of the queen, “which got about as many thumbs up as the one Lucian Freud did, which was not many”, commented Adrian Searle, the Guardian’s art critic and visiting professor at the Royal College of Art in London.
While a quick internet search does not immediately reveal Theresa May’s artistic ability, she does appreciate art, having forked out £110 for an oil painting of herself signing the article 50 letter that set Brexit in motion.
The tenure of Liz Truss, meanwhile, was too short for artistic opportunities. Although, she painted over the famous £840-a-roll gold wallpaper the Johnsons had hung in No 11 Downing Street, according to the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt – though he may have been joking.
Critics appeared divided on the Sunak effort. Searle labelled it inept. “I am not quite sure what these wavy lines at the top are. Is it a drowning bee? It doesn’t even have the requisite number of limbs, either.”
He added: “It’s a bit like a Tory policy. It’s all coagulated, the colours have run and it’s barely standing on its own two legs. Bees are in crisis, as we know. They are assailed by all sorts of problems, like climate warming and Asian giant hornets that want to dismember them. Everybody is worried about their plight. But I think this bee is beyond help really. It is beyond saving.”
The landscape and portrait artist Celia Montague had kinder words. “It’s an imaginative little bee, with its skewy eyes, and wings all on one side, and stripes all fallen off. It’s drawn to make the children laugh, surely,” she said. It was much like Johnson’s portrait of the queen.
“I don’t think with these paintings they are giving too much about themselves away.”
Johnson, she suspected, was “a talented and sensitive painter”, and had been spoken highly of as such by his late mother, the respected artist Charlotte Johnson Wahl.
Montague, who painted Johnson’s portrait while he was the mayor of London, recounted how he asked if he could draw her, took her paints and did a line drawing of her. “He’s definitely got an eye. He got all of the proportions right, and he rather captured something about me that I recognised. You know how Whistler used to lunge at the canvas? Well he was doing all of that.”
Sir Winston Churchill was said to be an accomplished painter – though Searle has disagreed, dismissing him as “a very bad painter, terribly conventional”. Churchill produced more than 500 paintings, and his most famous, The Tower of the Koutoubia Mosque, painted in 1943, sold for £8.3m in 2021.
It was Churchill whom Johnson was accused of trying to emulate when, on holiday in 2021 at the Spanish villa of his billionaire friend and peer Zac Goldsmith, he was photographed at an easel.
Hitler revealed his own desire to be a painter in his manifesto Mein Kampf, but was twice rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.
Of modern-day former world leaders, perhaps George W Bush is regarded as among the most artistically proficient. The former US president’s talent came to public attention after a Romanian hacker accessed his email accounts. Bush’s entries included images of two self-portraits in the bath and shower. Post-presidency his works have included portraits of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, the former German chancellor Angela Merkel, and the former British prime minister Tony Blair.
