Nikas Safronov, a Russian artist known for celebrity portraits and self-promotion, revealed last week the painting of Donald Trump that Russian President Vladimir Putin commissioned from him as a gift for the US president.
He showed CNN an image of the portrait, which depicts Trump after July 2024 assassination attempt against him, with blood on his face, fist raised defiantly, against the background of a US flag and the Statue of Liberty. “It was important to me to show the blood, the scar and his bravery during the attempt on his life,” Safronov told CNN.
Safronov said that while he suspected from the outset that Putin had ordered the portrait, he did not know for sure until the Russian president contacted him directly to convey the importance of the order.
Further confirming the origins of the painting, the Telegram channel of the Kremlin pool journalists for the state news agency RIA Novosti posted Safronov’s portrait with the words: “The very portrait that Putin gave to Trump.”
Steven Witkoff, one of Trump’s envoys in a White House campaign to broker a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, told conservative commentator Tucker Carlson: “President Putin had commissioned a beautiful portrait of President Trump from the leading Russian artist and actually gave it to me and asked me to take it home to President Trump.” Dmitry Peskov, a spokesperson for Putin, confirmed to reporters at the time that the Russian president had given “an absolutely personal gift” to “his American colleague”.
The US peace proposal is on Russia’s terms, with Ukraine ceding Crimea and other Russian-occupied territories. On Thursday of last week, Russia launched one of its deadliest strikes on Kyiv since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022.
Putin, the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and the late Pope Francis are among the world leaders whom Safronov has immortalised in portraits. Putin bestowed the title of “People’s Artist of Russia” on Safronov in 2021 for “great merit in the field of fine art”.
A similar painting, with some different details and by an unknown artist, displaced an official portrait of former President Barack Obama in the Grand Foyer of the White House earlier this month.
In March, Trump denounced a portrait of him in Colorado’s state Capitol building by the artist Sarah Boardman’s as “truly the worst”, leading to its removal. Safronov, in comments to the Russian tabloid Life.ru published on 24 March, compared the Trump image by Boardman to provincial Soviet portraits of collective farm chairmen, said he could do a better job and offered the help of Russian artists in training their American counterparts.
“The portrait of President Trump has no character or soul,” he told Life.ru. “It looks unnatural, somehow swollen. In Soviet times, such portraits of collective farm chairmen were painted for village clubs, and in the cities such art was no longer acceptable.”
Safronov has lived in Italy and painted numerous scenes of the country. Russian media reported on the artist’s February audience with Pope Francis. In the 1990s and 2000s, Safronov worked for the Russian edition of Penthouse magazine. He has appeared nude in widely circulated photos, brags about his sexual exploits and boasts of his 17-room, 7bn Ruble ($84.7m) penthouse near the Kremlin, which he says he is willing to the state.
Olga Galaktionova, the director of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, confirmed to reporters last month that the museum had acquired a Safronov work for its research collection (rather than main collection) under her predecessor, Elizaveta Likhacheva, who was ousted in January.