Interview: The Portrait Painter Who Makes CEOs Look Like Doges

A house interview. “Mihail Vasu” is our composite of the classically trained painters behind our commissioned portraits — a studio’s worth of hands presented as one man. The techniques and opinions are genuinely theirs. The name and the single pair of paint-ruined trousers are ours.

Mihail Vasu paints living men as dead aristocrats. Fund managers as Venetian doges. Software executives as Habsburg archdukes. A dentist from Scottsdale, memorably, as Philip IV of Spain, ermine and all. He works in oil on canvas, thirty by forty inches, from photographs, and he delivers in fourteen days with a proof-approval gate in the middle, which he calls “the moment of honesty.” We spoke in a studio that smelled of linseed and turpentine and, faintly, of empire.

Vice.io: Let us start with the obvious. Is this flattery for hire?

Vasu: No, and the distinction matters. Flattery is a lie about the subject. What I do is a truth about the subject told in a dialect he was born too late for. When I put a man in a doge’s cap, I am not saying he rules Venice. I am saying: here is what your particular face looks like when it is taken seriously by the most serious portrait tradition that ever existed. Most modern men have never once been looked at that way. A phone camera looks at you the way an accountant looks at you.

And the Renaissance painters — were they not flattering their subjects?

Constantly. Titian slimmed jaws. Bronzino lengthened fingers. But — and this is the professional secret — they flattered within the truth. The great portraits are recognizably the man, improved the way a good tailor improves a man, which is to say by editing, not by invention. I hold the same line. I will fix your lighting. I will not fix your nose. If you wanted a different nose you should have brought a different photograph or lived a different life.

Walk us through the fourteen days.

Day one, I study the photographs and choose the ancestor. Not the costume — the ancestor. Every commission secretly answers the question: which dead man does this living man rhyme with. A heavy brow and patient eyes, that is a Northern painting, Holbein country, fur and dark wood. A man with performance in his face, that is Venice, red silk, the confidence of a fortune made in shipping something. Days two through seven, the block-in and the first painting. Then the proof.

The moment of honesty.

Yes. I send the proof and one of three things happens. Most men approve with a short message that pretends to be casual. Some request the edit they were always going to request — usually hair, occasionally the jaw, once a man asked me to make his hands look like they had “done more manual labor,” which I did, because that is editing within the truth of who he wished to be, and a portrait is allowed one wish. And a few go quiet for a day. Those are my favorites. Those are the men who saw the painting and had a feeling in an unscheduled slot.

What does the oil itself do that a canvas print of a digital painting cannot?

Everything that matters and nothing that photographs. Oil is built in layers — the shadows are physically thinner than the light, so the light literally stands off the canvas and catches the room. A print is one flat layer of ink pretending to be decisions. Also, oil moves. In fifty years the painting will have settled, the way a house settles, and his grandchildren will inherit an object with a metabolism. You cannot bequeath a JPEG with a straight face. People try.

Who commissions these? The man himself, or someone who loves him?

Almost always someone who loves him, and almost always with mischief in it. A wife, a business partner, the guys from the fund. It arrives at the office, it gets unveiled in front of witnesses — I understand you people have built an entire product around the witnesses — and the subject performs embarrassment for exactly four minutes. Then it goes up on the wall. It never goes into a closet. In my whole career, not one closet. Remember that about men: the protest is theater, the hanging is sincere.

Any commission you refused?

A man wanted himself painted as a specific living monarch, crown and regalia, exact. No. That is not a portrait, that is a costume party with legal exposure. And I decline anything meant to humiliate the subject. The joke of these paintings is a warm joke. The man is in on it the moment he sees his own eyes looking back with five hundred years of borrowed gravity. If the painting punches down at him, it is not a gift, it is a prank with a frame, and pranks with frames are what LED neon is to my friend the glass bender. Adequate. From a distance.

Give the buyers one instruction.

Send good photographs — window light, no smiling with the teeth, the man looking slightly past the camera as if a servant has just announced something interesting. And then trust the tradition. You are not buying a picture of your friend. You are buying the argument that your friend, this exact ridiculous beloved man, deserves the treatment history reserved for people who owned navies. The argument costs 0.4 ETH. Navies ran considerably higher.

The commissioned portrait — thirty by forty inches, oil, proof approval before shipment — anchors more than one of our productions, including a package that ends with an opera singer in a lobby. Fourteen days from photograph to dynasty.