Official portrait of Bill Clinton hanging in National Portrait Gallery has Monica Lewinsky reference

Nelson Shanks painted an official portrait of President Bill Clinton, but he snuck in a reference to American politics and pop culture that will go down in history.

Shanks’ painting can be viewed at the National Portrait Gallery and he told Philly.com he snuck in a reference to Clinton’s former mistress, Monica Lewinsky.

He referred to painting Clinton as “hard,” because “The reality is he's probably the most famous liar of all time. He and his administration did some very good things, of course, but I could never get this Monica thing completely out of my mind.”

As a result, “it is subtly incorporated in the painting.”

Shanks said once Bill and his wife Hillary Clinton found out about it, they put pressure on the National Portrait Gallery to have it removed.

“If you look at the left-hand side of it there's a mantle in the Oval Office and I put a shadow coming into the painting and it does two things,” he said. “It actually literally represents a shadow from a blue dress that I had on a mannequin, that I had there while I was painting it, but not when he was there. It is also a bit of a metaphor in that it represents a shadow on the office he held, or on him.”

Shanks has also painted Pope John Paul II and Princess Diana. He was commissioned to paint Clinton in 2006.

image via Twitter from Gawker

image via Kristin Callahan/ACE/INFphoto.com

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