After hanging in the Colorado State Capitol for more than five years, a portrait of President Trump will be taken down and placed in storage after Mr. Trump criticized the painting as “purposefully distorted to a level that even I, perhaps, have never seen before.”
The Colorado General Assembly moved quickly on Monday to satisfy Mr. Trump’s demand to remove the offending portrait, hanging in the Gallery of Presidents in the building’s rotunda. Reflecting in a social media post over the weekend that “nobody likes a bad picture or painting of themselves,” the president said that he would “much prefer not having a picture than having this one,” describing it as “truly the worst.”
“Many people from Colorado have called and written to complain,” Mr. Trump wrote of the oil painting, which portrays Mr. Trump with remarkably softened features. “In fact, they are actually angry about it!”
Democrats, who control both chambers of the state legislature, assented to the painting’s removal at the request of their Republican colleagues, according to a statement by the Colorado House Democrats.
“The Speaker and Majority Leader are focused on keeping Coloradans safe and reducing costs, not hanging portraits,” the statement said. “If the G.O.P. wants to spend time and money on which portrait of Trump hangs in the Capitol, then that’s up to them.”
Mr. Trump also criticized Sarah Boardman, the artist who painted the piece, saying that she had done a much better job painting the portrait of President Barack Obama that currently hangs in the state Capitol. Ms. Boardman, the president speculated, “must have lost her talent as she got older.”
There was no immediate comment from Ms. Boardman, who lists the portrait on her website as one of her works. According to the website, she won a competition to paint the portraits of Mr. Obama and Mr. Trump that hang in the State Capitol in Denver.
When the portrait of Mr. Trump was unveiled in 2019, Ms. Boardman told The Denver Post that it was important to her to make paintings appear apolitical. It was unclear if Mr. Trump was previously aware of the portrait’s existence, and why he demanded its removal on Sunday — more than five years later.
Former State Senator Kevin Grantham, a Republican, launched an online fund-raising campaign during Mr. Trump’s first term in office to have the portrait painted as a way of honoring the president, and raised more than $10,000 in a matter of days, the newspaper reported.
The next stop for Mr. Trump’s portrait remains uncertain. The official order directing the painting’s removal said that it “shall be stored in a secure and appropriate location, as determined by the Director of Research of Legislative Council Staff, until further notice.”
