This article is taken from the July 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
Artist Lorna May Wadsworth has, over the years, spent a surprising amount of time listening to other people’s stories about Margaret Thatcher.
Wadsworth’s London studio is a bright, airy room, with views skimming the treetops of Hackney. It’s filled with the richly chromatic clutter typical of the studio of any busy, successful figurative painter: half-finished canvases, squeezed-out tubes of paint, scumbled palettes suggestive of urgent, wet-into-wet brushwork. But then also, dominating the scene, just as she dominated our lives for so many decades, a larger-than-life presence, impossible to ignore, there she is: Lady Thatcher.
Or, rather, there are multiple images of Lady Thatcher. In one vast, gold-ground image — her face viewed from below, tightly cropped — she is very much the Iron Lady, gazing resolutely into the face of History, eternal and unbowed. There’s also a loosely-painted oil sketch — intimate, almost tender — of what looks more like a frail, defenceless old lady. In yet another image, larger again, we encounter the iconic Lady Thatcher — but here, her soft-looking, aged face is built up in very thin oil washes, some dripping down the surface of the canvas, so that we can almost see through her — almost as if, as with some dementia sufferers, she were vanishing before our eyes.
Wadsworth, however, wants to discuss her most recent Thatcher project. Titled “An Iron Lady: The Legacy Paintings”, this powerful array of seven four-foot-tall portraits of Lady Thatcher, all derived from the same original image but each one different, was recently acquired by a single buyer.
This is good news, as the variation between individual works is surely the point of the exercise. In one, the focus is on gnarled, aged hands decked with elegant jewellery and the soft, sagging surface of that familiar face; another seems to portray that dignified icon of Tory radicalism evanescing into darkness; a third is daubed roughly with liquid iron paint, as if through some act of vandalism.
Here, in short, is Margaret Thatcher’s complex legacy rendered, with skill and passion, into visual form. But it’s also a highly personal account of five meetings that took place almost 20 years ago, between a 26-year-old artist and an 82-year-old world historical figure who was, by that point, struggling with the indignities of old age and mortality.
Meeting Wadsworth, it’s easy to see how she has convinced so many famous subjects to sit for her. Warm, unstuffy, funny, articulate — a keen observer of people — Lorna May Wadsworth is also, by her own admission, basically fearless, not least when it comes to chasing down potential sitters.
Having spotted Lady Thatcher at the opera, Wadsworth encouraged an old friend to make the introduction. So it was that, in the summer of 2007, the young artist found herself in the drawing room of that famous, heavily-curtained townhouse in Chester Square, crouched at the former prime minister’s feet, painting away furiously, a towel protecting the carpet from stray flecks of paint.
The five sittings lasted, in theory, an hour each. Occasionally, they overran. Wadsworth would point this out. Lady Thatcher, however, ever solicitous, simply asked Wadsworth how she was doing. Hearing that the work was progressing well, the Lady was not for turning: “Well, CARRY ON!”
Wadsworth’s pictures were to be the last portraits of Lady Thatcher taken from life. One now hangs prominently on a wall at Conservative HQ.
As the years passed, however, these encounters continued to resonate with Wadsworth — not least as she absorbed other people’s variegated responses to the images she had created. Her own reactions, too, surprised her. Having expected to meet a legend — heroic or monstrous, it hardly mattered — in the end, she came to love the vulnerable, trusting, extremely polite old lady with whom she spent those precious hours.
Wadsworth’s certainty that she could reimagine one of the most recognisable women of our age was less odd than it might appear. By the time she approached Lady Thatcher, the young artist had already completed widely acclaimed portraits of, amongst others, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, and home secretary David Blunkett.
The Blunkett portrait (2003) is a self-assured, stylish work. Heavy chiaroscuro hints obliquely at the sitter’s blindness. It’s a strong likeness — a quality never to be taken for granted in portraits — but also expressive, foreshadowing not just the close-cropped focus but also the luscious, eloquent brushwork so evident in the Thatcher paintings.
Whilst Wadsworth loves people, she also loves paint. Born in Sheffield in 1979, she studied at Falmouth College of Art, followed by a year at the Royal Drawing School. Her formative years coincided with the brash, irony-crazed cultural moment of Cool Britannia, Britpop and the YBAs. These were lean times for painters in oils, Jenny Saville’s big nudes notwithstanding. Here again, though, Wadsworth’s fearlessness helped. And whilst she continues to learn from the past — the influence of Velázquez, Lawrence and Sargent is evident in her work — she is very much a present-day artist.
If there’s a YBA heritage here, it shows in Wadsworth’s “don’t ask, don’t get” boldness — admirably Thatcherite! — as well as a fascination with the “female gaze”, exploring gendered modes of perception. What there isn’t, thankfully, is that tedious fixation on shock as an end in itself.
Wadsworth’s pictures reward sustained looking. They’re a rebuke to shattered attention spans, to sensibilities shredded by infinite scrolling. She’s dismissive of the sea of digital images, real or AI-hallucinated, in which we currently drown. She notes that, unlike a canvas, the thousands of “memories” entrusted to our iPhones are only as durable as the servers on which they are stored. As for her own politics, she’d much rather talk about Yves Klein Blue, encaustic technique and Edward Bulmer sample cards. This, too, is admirable.
Too narrow a focus on the political portraits, though, does Wadsworth’s career a disservice. She’s much in demand for portrait commissions. Here, she is represented by gallerist Philip Mould, though she prefers projects where her imagination can soar above the banalities of decision-by-committee.
Her prize-winning double portrait of restaurateurs Corbin and King (2015), garnished with a bravura still life of polished silver, captures more than a pair of likenesses. Nor is she over-dependent on heroic scale. Her studio contains several portraits, painted in wax on little blocks of ancient bog oak, small enough to hold in one hand. In these, Wadsworth has created works at once luminous, intimate yet memorably strange — not unlike some sort of sacred relic.
Finally, she has also engaged with religious themes. Here, her 12-foot-long oil on aluminium reworking of Leonardo’s Last Supper, now installed at St George’s Church, Nailsworth, Gloucestershire, is the key work. Titled A Last Supper (2009), the painting casts Jamaican-born fashion model Tafari Hinds in the role of Jesus. This makes it sound like some empty Culture Wars provocation — as if it existed only to deliver “look, a black Jesus!” as a punchline. What lifts the work above that, though, is the seriousness and skill with which the scene is depicted, allowing for a non-ironic, genuinely contemplative reading.
Does Wadsworth have any of our present politicians in her sights? Her reply to this is diplomacy itself, although it also adds to the impression that she cares more about subjects like ageing and memory than party politics per se. (Having said that, some forward-thinking donor really ought to try to coax Wadsworth into painting Kemi Badenoch, because the result would be magnificent.)
As the moment of departure loomed, Wadsworth turned to practicalities — the location of the most relevant bus stop, the advisability of visiting the loo first. “It’s a long way back to central London!”
Her tone, here, managed to combine outrageous charm, an endearingly mumsy concern for her interlocutor’s wellbeing, laser-focus on down-to-earth details — and, when it came to transmitting her advice, more than a glint of steely determination. The Iron Lady herself would, surely, have approved.
