Kevin Rudd: A portrait of a very important man

The unveiling of the official portrait of former prime minister Kevin Rudd at Parliament House, with the artist, third from right. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

We can see at once that this is the portrait of an important man.

It is ostensibly casual, as the sitter, former prime minister Kevin Rudd, looks around from his desk as though just interrupted at work, and the open shirt may also hint at his common touch and sympathy for ordinary people. But the interior, spare in detail yet opulent in scale and with its plunging perspective, is designed to produce a grandiose impression, perhaps in this case even a little over-emphatic and hyperbolic.

This dramatic perspective is in fact a characteristic device of the artist, which he has often used before for similar effect.

Ralph Heimans is a painter of important people, indeed of very important ones, including monarchs, princes, judges and stars. He is an Australian resident in London and, from the short video clips we can see on his website, he seems an engaging man, clever, inventive and disarmingly frank.

He is undoubtedly a skilful painter, but has adapted both to the difficulty of painting individuals who cannot give him much time for sittings, and to the constraints inherent in producing extremely realistic images of their impressive environments.

There is always a degree of collaboration between an artist and a sitter, particularly when the portrait is a commission, and the sitter has a certain idea of the way he wants to be shown to the world.

In this case sitter and artist were clearly in accord about the general approach to the picture. Heimans was quite at home producing the elaborate environment that could speak of Rudd’s status, his eminence and perhaps particularly his culture: almost half of the background is occupied by meticulously painted shelves full of books and Chinese blue-and-white ceramics, recalling the sitter’s oriental learning.

There are real books on the desk, not a laptop, and Rudd holds a fountain pen in his right hand. Three volumes in Chinese occupy the left foreground of the composition. A fine ceramic tea cup sits in front of him, perhaps recalling the ancient Chinese saying, “we drink water to slake our thirst, wine to relieve melancholy and tea to clear the mind.” A chessboard occupies the foreground of the composition, representing strategic intellect and hinting at mastery of the game of political life. A cat picks its way across the chessboard; is it too much to fancy that this feline recalls the brilliant and ruthless Cardinal Richelieu, also Prime Minister in his day, whose cats would stroll across his desk?

Queen Elizabeth II

It is the home of an intellectual, but also a wealthy man; instead of a modest scholar’s study, the sitter is shown in a room as big as a public art gallery; deep space enhances the sense of his dignity and the view ends in a set of what appear to be Aboriginal burial poles, alluding no doubt to what he would consider one of the most important moments of his government; like many people who were not prone to apologising or explaining in professional life, he could make an exception when the apology would be performative and, rather than an admission of fault, a demonstration of virtue.

Another painter might have felt some sense of queasiness or even despair as he was drawn into painting this busy and extravagant allegory of his sitter’s government.

But Heimans has dealt with even more important sitters and far more elaborate interiors and is not to be daunted by what is after all only a prosperous private house. But where he has perhaps run into a tacit conflict with his sitter is in the portrait itself. Even the likeness of an important man should hint at his inner life and character, but it feels almost as though Rudd were resisting him: the odd gesture of his left hand, which would be natural if momentary and transitional, appears defensive as well as slightly affected when frozen like this, presumably by the camera.

The face itself, which is the focus of the whole painting although dwarfed by the proliferation of details intended to be significant, appears from the photographs I have seen to be strangely impenetrable. The painterly surface itself has little tactile life or sense of animation; the features seem to be set firmly against any attempt to detect what lies within. The eyes are more watchful than expressive, the mouth self-conscious. There is just a slight hint of vulnerability or self-doubt which seems to be consciously repressed.

A portrait of His Royal Highness, King Charles, by Australian-born artist Ralph Heimans.

One of the things that great portrait painters have always been good at, in addition to their painterly craft, is putting their sitters at ease, inducing them to relax, to reveal their character and sensibility.

Heimans clearly succeeded with his 2017 portrait of Prince Philip, which effortlessly combines a sense of royal bearing with relaxed and affable humanity. But Kevin Rudd seems to have been a harder subject to read, or more resistant to giving anything away. It is as though he has not let his guard down for a moment but remained in control of the whole process, so that the picture is less an account of a complex and interesting man than the confirmation of the way that he wants to be represented.

Christopher Allen is The Australian’s art critic.