Exercise: Analyse a Formal Portrait - Part 4, Project 1

Tony Blair (2012) by Alastair Adams, Oil on Canvas

The portrait I have chosen for this exercise is a fairly recent one of ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair, painted in 2012 while the Olympic Games were going on, and on show to the public for the first time at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters Annual Exhibition at the Mall Galleries in London from May 8-22, 2014. As it is owned by the artist, Alastair Adams, and has never been shown publicly before, there is little written about it. Adams states that he painted it with Blair's cooperation when he was doing an official portrait for the National Portrait Gallery, and wanted to catch the more informal side of the international statesman that he had come to know. I had the chance to see if for myself at the Mall Galleries exhibition, thought it was striking, and felt it would be a good idea to attempt to analyse a portrait without the help of the experts.

Tony Blair (2011) 4' x 3'

The style is quite different from the official portrait Adams did (opp.) which can be seen in the National Portrait Gallery, and has no props in it. In Adams' informal version above, the eye is  drawn immediately to Blair's relaxed face, framed by the slightly pop version of the flag around his head, and the militant slogan above it. It is painted in the realist style and is, technically, very good, with lots of background detail that can be interpreted both literally and figuratively. For me, living through the years of the Troubles, massacres in Africa, genocide in Bosnia and the ever-present threat of Middle East crises, the painting is strangely discordant. On the one hand the subject is relaxed, but the background seems to be saying Be Wary. There are a lot of threats in the world to peace.

It shows a youthful-looking hands-in-pockets Mr Blair at home in his house in Buckinghamshire, wearing jeans, an open-necked shirt and a jacket that looks slightly like the sort of bomber jacket that his friend George “Dubbya” Bush favours. There is a strong white uneven mark on the right side of the jacket which looks like a paint splatter, but is possibly a logo or a printed map of some area. Perhaps the jacket was given as a memento to those who took part in a conference he was attending. (It looks very like the collection of t-shirts, baseball caps, baseball jackets, pens  and knick-knacks that my husband amassed in attending conferences as part of his career in international business .) Blair is standing in front of his office desk, a traditional mahogany one with brass rosette drawer handles, which holds two phones and some family photographs; the former suggesting that he is a busy man who sees himself as a communicator (he is Britain's Middle East Peace Envoy after all), and the latter suggesting that his family are just one of his priorities. A blue electrical cord crosses the desk, perhaps attached to a lap-top or tablet computer.

But it is the painting behind him on the wall with a Union Jack in the centre of it that makes this portrait so powerful for me. As it is in Mr Blair's private collection (bought in 2008 for £26,250 from Christie's) and located in his study, it gives the first impression of him being very patriotic. However, this painting on the wall is not quite what it seems at first glance. Painted by Ken Howard R.A., who was appointed official artist of the Imperial War Museum in 1973, and spent time documenting the Troubles in Northern Ireland. it shows a Loyalist mural bearing the slogan "NO SURRENDER". What are we to make of this? No-one who lived in the UK from the late sixties could avoid knowing about the Troubles. Tony Blair worked hard on the peace process in Northern Ireland in the 1990's. Later, in his work in the Middle East, he said, "To bring people together you have to understand in a genuine sense why they feel as strongly as they do. This is not a matter of reason but of emotion."  "Many of the hundreds of hours I spent in discussion with the parties were not simply about specific blockages or details of the negotiation, but rather about absorbing and trying to comprehend why they felt as they did and communicating that feeling to the other side. In this way, they became my friends, because I then had inside me something of the passions they felt inside them." I notice here he makes no mention of Mo Mowlam or John Major - a huge oversight!

Was his purchase of the Howard painting part of his attempt to understand the depth of emotion felt by the Loyalists and resulting in so many acts of terrorism? Did he believe both sides were right? Is he somehow disloyal to Britain by owning a painting like this? Or is Alastair Adams showing us that Tony Blair believes deeply that, with mediation, conflicts can be resolved. Does Blair believe he is the only one who can solve them (the much-written-about-Messiah-complex) or does Blair the pragmatist believe that people create conflicts and people will solve them; the key being understanding?

I am in the latter category. No matter what history will make of Tony Blair the politician, I believe the man is deeply committed to the idea of world peace, even if he does manage to put himself at the forefront a lot of the time and take a disproportionate amount of credit when things go well;  and I also believe that Alastair Adams has captured this dedication beautifully in this portrait.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/24/tony-blair-northern-ireland-peace-process
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/tony-blair-portrait-britpop-union-3496713
http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/474072/Commissioned-portrait-by-Alastair-Adams-reveals-Tony-Blair-s-Loyalist-painting