Pietro Annigoni: Commissions Rejected

"Portrait of Don Giulio Facibeni"
by Pietro Annigoni

"Inevitably the exhibition of the Queen's portrait and all the publicity accompanying it brought a new avalanche of requests for portraits, more than I could possibly have painted if I lived a hundred years and did nothing else. Today, when I have given up painting commissioned portraits altogether, it is like a nightmare to recall those days. But how revealing they were of the extraordinary ideas many people have about artists. How many people thought themselves so important that I could not possibly refuse them, and how many more thought that I would change my mind if they offered more than my usual fee.

Then there were people, intelligent and famous people, like Clare Boothe Luce and Queen Juliana of Holland, who apparently thought that I could paint them at one sitting. I offered to make a sketch of Mrs. Luce, who was passing through Florence and had only a few hours, but she wanted a painting, and that was that. For the portrait of the Dutch Queen, I was approached by the Netherlands Embassy in London. When it was suggested that I should have one sitting I replied, 'The Queen of England gave me sixteen sittings. Why should the Queen of Holland give only one?' and that, too, was that.  

Other portraits I didn't paint included the blonde American woman who forced her way into my Florence studio and demanded to be painted immediately, the Emperor Haile Selassie, and Margaret, Duchess of Argyll. The unknown American threatened me, 'If you don't do my portrait I'll go to Dali!' I told her to go to the devil for all I cared. The Emperor was a rather longer problem. The request for a portrait of him with his wife, came to me from the Ethiopian Embassy in Rome. My enthusiasm was somewhat diminished when I learned that, instead of wearing the colourful Ethiopian costume I had expected, he wanted to be painted in military uniform. But I agreed to take the commission and offered to go to Addis Ababa for two months to carry it out. Then I heard no more about it. For seven months I wrote a number of letters asking what was happening. They all went unanswered. Then one day I received a telegram brusquely worded like a royal command: You are expected in Addis Ababa on such and such a date . . .  I ignored it.

I was invited by the Duke and Duchess to lunch at their London home. The Duke treated me as though I was asking him for the favour of being permitted to paint his wife. He spoilt my lunch by lecturing me about his wife's beauty and how I should treat this and that feature in the portrait. Later, he wrote several letters to me explaining what he wanted and telling me to remember this and not to forget that. When I could stand no more of this nonsense, I wrote to him and told him not to worry any more about the portrait because I was not going to paint it." 

To be continued 

(Excerpted from "Pietro Annigoni: An Artist's Life" by Pietro Annigoni, 1977.)