An excerpt from Boris Johnson - The Rise and Fall of a Troublemaker at Number 10, Andrew Gimson, Simon & Schuster, 2022.
Chapter: Celia Montague
Asked on 25 June 2019 by a television interviewer what he did to relax, Johnson said he liked painting old wine boxes so they looked like buses. People laughed, and discussed whether this could be true. As so often, he had turned something important into a joke. He began by saying 'I like to paint', before veering into an account of using his paintbrush to make wooden crates which had held two bottles of wine look like double-deckers complete with passengers.
Celia Montague painted the portrait of Johnson on the back cover of this book. In it he looks more earnest than he does in almost all the photographs that have been taken of him. While he was still mayor of London, she met him at a book launch and asked whether she could paint his portrait. He asked in a tone of horror if he would have to buy the portrait. As soon as she had reassured him that he would not have to part with any money, he gave his consent.
Montague arrived at City Hall for the first of the two sittings which had been agreed, and waited in his outer office, 'listening involuntarily to some very intense, high-energy exchanges' between members of his staff. To calm her nerves, and save time when she actually got in to see him, she put up her easel and mixed some paints.
At long last she was admitted. He was signing a pile of title pages for his Churchill book. She was appalled by the light in his office, and wondered where she should get him to sit. Spirited conversation took place on various extraneous topics. He enthused about the paints she had already mixed, and in order to buy herself more time to think how to go about the picture, she found herself asking, 'Do you want to have a go?'
He jumped at it, and began to paint a self-portrait. While he worked with furious concentration, entirely focused on his work, she took photographs of him. In her opinion, his self- portrait, though obviously satirical, shows an amazing familiarity with the details of his facial features'. She wondered 'how many of us could produce an account of our own face like that, without reference at least to a glance in the mirror?' When he had finished, he declared he would paint her, and produced a creditable likeness, though she claims he shaved thirty years off her age.
During her study of him, she observed that he has 'two charming physical characteristics'. One is his voice, 'a lovely warm chest voice with a great bubble of laughter and enjoyment in it', The other is 'a quirk of the mouth that makes him look both shy and mischievous at the same time'. In the middle of his upper lip, he has 'a little protrusion, a very slight point - like the beak of a baby bird, which pushes down over his bottom lip when he's feeling uncertain or playing for time'.
He sat a second time for her, at her studio in Oxford, and was going to give further sittings, but then the EU Referendum intervened. She concluded she would have to paint him from the photographs she had taken of him while he himself was at work. This she never normally does, and she found it agony, with his nose a particular difficulty.
But by deciding to do the picture from photographs taken when, being lost in his work, he was not playing up to the camera or to an audience, she has caught him with quite a different expression from the one he wears when he is trying to amuse, seduce and distract. She has caught him being serious.
At the end of 2016, Montague asked the Master of Balliol, Sir Drummond Bone, whether the college might be interested in acquiring her portrait of Johnson. Sir Drummond replied that 'whilst in normal times we might well be interested in a painting of Boris, Brexit has meant that these are not normal times, and such an acquisition would at the moment be extremely controversial, to put it mildly.' In plain language, if Balliol bought the portrait it would be torn to pieces by the current generation of students.
