Donald Trump’s portraits

Suggestions to Trump for better portraits.

Intrepid WaPo reporter David Fahrenthold can’t find an image of the giant portrait of Donald Trump that the Trump Foundation bought for $20,000. It isn’t this:

Judging by this and other portraits Fahrenthold has located, Trump is overpaying  for hackwork.  They really won’t do for the Gold House (as it will be renamed after the do-over). Here are my tips for real class.

Hyacinthe Rigaud, Louis XIV, 1701

For a more psychological approach, I suggest the Russian (brownie points) Suprematists (double brownie points):

Kazimir Malevich,  Black Square, 1922-30

He will also need an ensemble picture recording his triumph on election night. Only a full-blooded Romantic could do full justice to this epic story.

Eugène Delacroix, The Death of Sardanapalus, 1827
Eugène Delacroix, The Death of Sardanapalus, 1827

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Don’t complain that I already used the Delacroix five years ago to make a different point. This is a very low-budget operation. Sad!

Author: James Wimberley

James Wimberley (b. 1946, an Englishman raised in the Channel Islands. three adult children) is a former career international bureaucrat with the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. His main achievements there were the Lisbon Convention on recognition of qualifications and the Kosovo law on school education. He retired in 2006 to a little white house in Andalucia, His first wife Patricia Morris died in 2009 after a long illness. He remarried in 2011. to the former Brazilian TV actress Lu Mendonça. The cat overlords are now three. I suppose I've been invited to join real scholars on the list because my skills, acquired in a decade of technical assistance work in eastern Europe, include being able to ask faux-naïf questions like the exotic Persians and Chinese of eighteenth-century philosophical fiction. So I'm quite comfortable in the role of country-cousin blogger with a European perspective. The other specialised skill I learnt was making toasts with a moral in the course of drunken Caucasian banquets. I'm open to expenses-paid offers to retell Noah the great Armenian and Columbus, the orange, and university reform in Georgia. James Wimberley's occasional publications on the web

2 thoughts on “Donald Trump’s portraits”

  1. Another irony fail. Sigh.

    The scene is a sexed-up Führerbunker, set in ancient Assyria. According to Diodorus, King Sardanapalus was defeated by rebels. Delacroix' Las Vegas orgy of self-destruction is already there in his Greek source, which is largely fiction. Wikipedia:

    To avoid falling into the hand of his enemies, Sardanapalus had a huge funeral pyre created for himself on which were piled "all his gold, silver and royal apparel". He had his eunuchs and concubines boxed in inside the pyre, burning himself and them to death.

    James

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