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Podcaster and former politician Rory Stewart had a nasty case of expectations meeting reality this week when a new portrait of him was unveiled.
As part of the Portrait Artist of the Year competition, Stewart sat for a few painters. One, Lorena Levi, produced an impressionistic rendering of the former Tory MP in an ill-fitting jacket.
But Stewart, who sees himself as a great man of history, was unimpressed. On his podcast with Alastair Campbell, The Rest Is Politics, he described the painting as “slightly grotesque, slightly combative” and said Levi “produced a caricature of me”.
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We asked Levi what she thought of Stewart’s review. “Grotesque is such a big word to use,” she said. “Maybe he was hoping for something a bit more heroic?” Stewart, who walked across Afghanistan and served as a deputy governor in Iraq before entering parliament, once ambitiously compared himself to Alexander the Great and dreamed of becoming prime minister. “My objective isn’t to make a royal court painting of someone,” Levi quipped, “I don’t really care for that.”
Stewart ended up taking a different portrait home with him from the competition, one painted by an artist who has read his books and is a self-confessed fan. “That painting showed him in a pretty heroic light. It made him look really powerful,” Levi said. “I’m more interested in trying to figure out the inner world or the psychology of my sitter.”
![](https://static.standard.co.uk/2023/10/27/10/42/Lorena%20Levi.jpg)
The painting Stewart chose is, he admitted to Campbell on the podcast, “very impressive but a bit embarrassing.” It is, after all, a six-foot canvas painting of his head. No room for nuance there.
Either way, Levi is through to the semi-finals.