A painting of posh, privileged members of the Bullingdon Club, which was commissioned to get around copyright law, is to appear at auction.
Rona Marsden’s “class of ‘87” image is a familiar one – 10 young and confident students, including David Cameron and Boris Johnson, lined up in their tails and yellow waistcoats and posing on the steps of Christ Church college, Oxford.
The original photograph was first published in the Mail on Sunday in 2007 and, given the dining and drinking club’s reputation for boisterous bad behaviour, it was clearly embarrassing to Cameron. Soon after permission to republish the photograph was withdrawn by Gillman & Soame, the Oxford portrait photographers who hold the copyright.
To get over that hurdle, the then BBC Newsnight journalist Michael Crick had the idea of commissioning an artist to paint the photograph instead.
Marsden, who mostly paints in black and white, was hired. “It happened very quickly,” she said of the commission. “I didn’t really know the full story, I wasn’t paying attention to politics at the time so I didn’t realise the fuss. But I thought: ‘I can paint it.’”
“I happened to have a 3ft by 4ft canvas primed and ready to use in my studio in Oxford so I began that night.”
By lunchtime the next day it was complete and the BBC filmed her and the painting in her studio. Newsnight then decided it wanted the portrait live in the studio.
“They said they would send a car but I said it’s not coming without me because it was still so wet. I went down to the studio with the painting in the back of the car, it was very funny.”
Marsden was paid a small fee for the painting, which she got to keep. It has since been used by newspapers including the Observer and the Independent and was even made into a tea towel by the artist. “I still have a few left somewhere. I need to find them,” she said
Twelve prints of the painting have also been made, but being offered for sale by Mallams auction house in Oxford is the original oil painting, which is expected to attract bids in excess of £5,000.
Who might buy it remains to be seen. In a 2009 interview Cameron admitted being embarrassed by the photograph. “We do things when we are young that we deeply regret,” he told the BBC’s Andrew Marr.
Marsden said all the young men in the picture clearly exuded a “confidence and entitlement … I don’t have a problem with that being David Cameron’s history but the fact he tried to hide it was his mistake.”
The artist will retain the right to reproduce the image after the painting is sold on 8 December, but added that after almost a decade of the original being in her studio, the time was right to sell. “I thought it’s almost 10 years, maybe it’s time. I probably should have sold it the day David Cameron left,” she said.