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The British artist called “truly the worst” by the US president, Donald Trump, after he derided a portrait she created of him, has said the criticism called her “integrity into question” and is threatening her career.
Sarah A Boardman painted Trump’s official portrait for the Colorado state capitol building in Denver, where it hung for six years from 2019.
In March, Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform that the portrait had been “purposefully distorted”. Trump said Boardman’s portrait of the former US president Barack Obama was “wonderful”, but “the one on me is truly the worst”.
In her first comment since the incident, Boardman said Trump’s comments meant that her “intentions, integrity and abilities were, in my opinion, called into question”.
Boardman rebuked the president’s claims in a statement, saying she had “completed the portrait accurately, without ‘purposeful distortion’, political bias, or any attempt to caricature the subject, actual or implied”.
The artist said that while she acknowledged Trump’s right to comment, the “additional allegations that I ‘purposefully distorted’ the portrait, and that I ‘must have lost my talent as I got older’ are now directly and negatively impacting my business of over 41 years, which now is in danger of not recovering”.
Discussing her work with the Colorado Times Recorder in 2019, she acknowledged that there would “always be anger at a president from one side or the other. It is human nature.”
In response to Trump’s criticism, officials said the portrait would be removed, and it has been since. Boardman says that for the first six years after she painted the portrait, she “received overwhelmingly positive reviews and feedback”, but that since Trump’s comments “that has changed for the worse”.
Boardman was born in Britain, and her website says she spent years travelling around Australia, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, Malaysia, the Middle East, Europe and the US while “conducting a successful career in airline travel and business”.
In 1985, she began studying techniques of the old masters in Germany and built a successful career as an artist, eventually winning a nationwide “call for artists” by the state of Denver, to paint the official portraits of presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
Trump guards his image closely. In January 2025, before his inauguration, he released a portrait that was variously described by critics as serious or ominous, and seemed to reference his 2023 mugshot.
That image was taken after he was charged with attempting to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden in the state of Georgia – a charge Trump denied.
After Trump’s criticism of Boardman, his envoy Steve Witkoff confirmed the White House had been sent a new work from Moscow, which was a gift from Vladimir Putin. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov described it as a “personal gift”.
Witkoff described the picture as a “beautiful portrait” by a “leading Russian artist”.
