Earlier this week, the Parliamentary Art Collection unveiled, to great acclaim, its newest item: a portrait of Theresa May by the British painter Saied Dai.
The painting was commissioned by the Speaker’s advisory committee on works of art , which serves to memorialise public servants who have made a significant contribution to UK political life. May’s inclusion, the parliamentary blurb notes, “recognises her service to the constituents of Maidenhead since 1997, as well as the variety of positions she has held since then”.
These positions include, of course, being the home secretary who devised the hostile environment and the prime minister who failed to deliver Brexit, neither of which exactly endeared her to a divided public.
Nonetheless, the painting has elicited wide-eyed joy. That’s because it really is rather wonderful. Twitter users have expressed delight: “Would legit hang that over my fireplace,” posted one. “An absolutely barnstorming portrait,” posted another. To journalist Emma Brockes, the painting triggered such feelings of warmth and nobility that she wondered whether she’d got May all wrong.
“Normally we live in monastic quiet,” Dai tells me over the phone from his village studio on the outskirts of Bath. “So this is all a little bit bewildering. If these are my 15 minutes, I hope they’ll be over soon.”
The painting has taken a year to complete. Shortly before Covid, the committee informed Dai that he’d been shortlisted for a commission, but not who the sitter would be. When he was finally told, an interview with May was scheduled at her Westminster office. They spoke for 45 minutes.
“She obviously interviewed the other two candidates, but soon after that, she decided she wanted me to paint her.”
What convinced her?
“We had a rapport,” he says. “I liked her. It takes a lot of courage to have your portrait painted. It’s a very intimate and intensive process and you need to feel comfortable with one another. They’d done their research – two years, to find who they thought were the right candidates. So it was just putting the two things together.”
The portrait reportedly cost £28,000. Dai is a member of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. The website details his baseline fees: drawings start at £3,000, oils at £15,000. He requires between four and seven sittings, during which he mostly draws, then works in the studio from those studies.
As a portraitist, Dai is highly sought-after. He has won several awards, most recently the 2023 William Lock portrait prize.
The National Portrait Gallery collection includes his 2013 work, Dame Monica Margaret Mason – a portrait of the former ballet dancer and director of the Royal Ballet, on the eve of her retirement, draped in midnight velvet with an arch expression on her half-turned face. He has painted directors, soldiers, clerics, philanthropists, pianists holding sheet music to their breast, the first Lady Master of the Mercers’ livery company and Jacqueline Wilson with a rocking horse.
When May picked him, to his surprise, she opted to come to his studio. Like all former prime ministers, she travels with a six-strong security detail. They did three daylong sessions, stopping for lunch with his wife, the painter Charlotte Sorapure. May is a keen cook herself. “Apparently she has about 400 cookbooks.”
Dai’s work does not equivocate. In its careful composition and clearcut shapes, its penchant for the symbolic object and the expressive gesture, it leans heavily into the Renaissance, each element a kind of mise en abyme into art history – or, as he puts it, “all those dead artists looking over your shoulder in judgment.”
The military coat is in fact a composite of two they tried, there for pictorial structure and symbolic protection – as he puts it, “a politician does go into battle every single day”. The red of the collar and booklet were similarly compositional necessities but a closed book held close also hints at her withheldness, while the lily of the valley, convallaria majalis, is a nod to her name.
I wonder if he started plotting these things out as soon as they met. No, he says. He tries to start as open-mindedly as possible, aiming to observe what the sitter would say with her presence.
This will sound incongruous to anyone who’s sat through a May press conference, but Dai says they played a lot to find the right pose. He decided early on that she should stand – “she’s very stylish, statuesque” – and though he’d asked that she bring clothing options, he opted for vintage pieces belonging to his wife to achieve the sculptural silhouette he needed.
What struck Dai was May’s shyness – and her dignity. “There’s no overt egotism. There was decency and honesty, whatever you may think of the politics she was thrust into.”
His job, as he sees it, is to be above politics. If the portrait he paints is to last, the person, more than any role they have held, has to come through. “Otherwise it’s just a stuffed dummy.”
Besides, as he puts it, “when you see what came after her, and before, you can actually see in context that she was a far more decent and principled and honest person just trying to do their best against an impossible task. I mean, thank God, it wasn’t Boris that I had to paint. Although he would be a gift to an artist, it would be difficult to dignify and ennoble such a character, because he’s like a caricature already. I would have to restrain myself, because otherwise it would be unacceptable.”
I put it to him that almost all the powerful women he’s painted are draped in a shade of regal blue – royal, navy, prussian, midnight, azure, steel. There isn’t any conscious symbolism behind his colour choices, he says. He loves “those Holbein greens”. Here, he wanted a very rich palette, “a major key, but nothing gaudy. Like a Persian miniature – with minor keys running through it, slightly sad, more introspective, more contemplative.” May might look a bit stern, but then, as you look further, it softens.
The experience he says, was wonderful. “People like us don’t meet. And she would not meet people like me either. There’s an equality about it – you meet each other as human beings.”
