Political Figures

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Leaders have always needed images, and artists have supplied them, flattered them and taken them apart. Gentile Bellini travelled from Venice to Constantinople and painted Sultan Mehmed II in 1480, and Titian's Emperor Charles V at Mühlberg (1548) set a ruler on horseback in armour, a formula copied for centuries. In colonial Boston, John Singleton Copley painted the agitator Samuel Adams pointing to the city's charter, and Gilbert Stuart's full-length George Washington (1796), known as the Lansdowne portrait, cast a president in the language of republican virtue.

Caricature did the opposite. Thomas Nast's cartoons of the early 1870s helped bring down William Tweed, boss of New York's corrupt political machine. The 20th century added the camera: official photographers like Pete Souza recorded presidents at work, and Shi Xinning painted Mao Zedong into scenes of Western life as if in old photographs.