The news that United States Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has spent the past 20 years taking undisclosed luxury vacations on the dime of Republican donor Harlan Crow comes with a bizarre art angle: Crow has immortalized their time together in a painting that hangs at his home at Camp Topridge, a massive compound in Upstate New York’s Adirondack Park.
It’s a photo-realistic work that depicts Crow and Thomas with lawyers Peter Rutledge, Leonard Leo, and Mark Paoletta—all described by ProPublica, which broke the story, as “conservative operatives”—sitting in rustic wooden rocking chairs at Crow’s resort. (Leo, a Federalist Society leader, is said to have been instrumental in the confirmation of a third of the Supreme Court’s current justices, including Thomas, who faced allegations of sexual harassment during his hearings.)
Surrounded by verdant trees, the five men sit below statue of a bare-chested Native American man who is reaching up to the heavens. Crow wears a long-sleeved gingham shirt and khaki shorts that end above the knee with strap-on sandals. Thomas has on a striped blue polo shirt and a casual vest with khaki pants and brown shoes. Both men are smoking cigars.
The canvas is the work of Sharif Tarabay, a Montreal illustrator repped by John Brewster Creative Services in Westport, Connecticut. His artistic influences are reportedly 19th- and 20th-century painters—specifically Norman Rockwell and Haddon Hubbard Sundblom, an American illustrator best known for the Coca-Cola Santa Claus, considered to be the first modern depiction of the legendary Christmas saint.
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/clarence-thomas-republican-donor-vacation-painting-2282167
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