Salvador Dalí's Portraits Ranked by the Backlash They Caused

Feature image: Salvador Dalí, Portrait of Mrs. Ann W. Green and her Son Jonathan, 1963 via WikiArt/Public Domain

Between the 1950s and the early 1970s, Salvador Dalí ran a lucrative and largely overlooked sideline painting the likenesses of American industrialists, socialites, and their children. The formula rarely changed: a sitter positioned against the sun-bleached coastline of Port Lligat, a rider on a white horse somewhere in the middle distance, a lone angel, a spindly tree, and enough private symbolism to fill a letter of explanation that only the patron and the artist ever fully understood. What the formula could not disguise, however, was how often these commissions went sideways. Sitters found themselves aged, thickened, or subtly mocked. Some portraits were rejected outright. Others were quietly banished to hallways and storage rooms for decades. This ranking orders seven of Dalí's American society portraits from mildest friction to flat-out rejection, based on how the sitters, their families, or later critics actually responded once the paint had dried.

Frank Brian Mercer was a British industrialist and Fellow of the Royal Society who met Dalí in New York and struck up a genuine friendship with him, one that deepened during Mercer's regular visits to his Spanish licensee near Cadaqués, where the sittings eventually took place. Dalí wrapped Mercer in a draped white sheet, seated him against a grey plain and a cracked stone arch, and folded a second, ghostly female profile into the swirl of the chair beneath him. Rather than object to the strangeness, Mercer treasured the result. His friend and fellow Royal Society fellow Sir Hugh Ford later wrote that Mercer considered it the finest of the small handful of formal portraits Dalí painted in his lifetime, and Mercer eventually bequeathed the canvas to the Royal Society itself, where it remains today.

If there is any controversy here, it belongs to art history rather than to the sitter. Dalí had, by 1973, all but abandoned society commissions in favor of Spanish royalty and old friends, making Mercer's portrait something of an anomaly: proof that the artist could still summon real engagement for a patron he liked, decades after critics had written off his portraiture as a cash grab. It is the rare entry on this list with a happy ending, which is precisely why it opens the countdown rather than closing it.

Born Eva May Talkish in Pennsylvania, Eva Suero married into the wealthy Suero Falla family after her husband Alin, taken with an earlier Dalí portrait of his sister, arranged for the artist to paint his second wife. The sittings sprawled across four countries over more than a year, following Dalí between New York, Paris, Madrid, and Cadaqués. The finished portrait recast Eva as a classical goddess wrapped in a cracked, toga-like sheet, a nod to the myth of Pygmalion that flattered her famed beauty even as the fabric's fissures hinted at something more fragile beneath.

The trouble arrived at the unveiling. Dalí had quietly dropped an entire figure the family expected to see, the couple's teenage daughter, who had posed for days in an elaborate owl mask under the assumption she would appear in the final work. Alin also felt Dalí had aged his wife beyond her years, a complaint the artist deflected by insisting he had painted how Eva would look in the future rather than how she looked that day. Eva herself came around to the portrait over time, which keeps this entry firmly in the category of resolved friction rather than lasting resentment.

A Philadelphia debutante descended from department store magnate John Wanamaker, Rosemary Chisholm moved through the same Palm Beach and Long Island circles as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and her close friend C.Z. Guest. Dalí painted her in a pale blue and white evening gown, diamonds at her throat, framed by his usual sandy horizon. The composition pushes Chisholm unusually low in the canvas, a quirk her son later traced to a practical grievance: Dalí charged an extra $3,000 to paint a sitter's hands, and rather than pay it, the family let him crop them out entirely, crowding the figure toward the bottom of the frame.

The sharper barb is easy to miss. Beside Chisholm, Dalí included a single white rose, a clear reference to her name, rendered just slightly wilted at the edges. Her own son later admitted he was not sure his mother ever noticed the detail, which reads less like an accident and more like Dalí's quiet commentary on a woman who was, in his eyes, gracefully but unmistakably past her prime at forty. It is a small, almost private controversy, embedded in a portrait its subject seems to have genuinely admired.

As the eleventh president of the DuPont company and a fixture on the cover of Time magazine, Lammot du Pont Copeland had long wanted a Dalí in the family collection. When his wife Pamela refused to sit for the artist, Copeland volunteered himself instead, posing at the St. Regis over half a dozen sittings, reportedly alongside the pet ocelot belonging to Dalí's manager. His son later described the finished work warmly, reading the road behind his father as the road of life and the tree as a nod to knowledge.

Art historians have been far less generous. The portrait arrives squarely inside the stretch of the mid-1960s when Dalí's American commissions grew visibly hurried, and specialists cataloging his portrait work have singled out Copeland's likeness by name as one of the weakest of the period, describing its chalky palette and stiff execution as evidence the artist had largely checked out of his own portrait sideline by then. The controversy belongs entirely to posterity rather than to the patron, but it is a pointed one: a DuPont president paying top dollar for what scholars now consider one of Dalí's least inspired society portraits.

Abel Edward Fagen, a Chicago textile broker whose wife Mildred had already sat for Dalí five years earlier, commissioned his own companion portrait expecting something that would visually echo hers. Instead, Dalí used him as a test case for stencil experimentation, masking off a rectangular window around Fagen's head and torso and spray-painting the border with cutlery pressed against the canvas as a stencil, leaving faint outlines of spoons and forks embedded in a hazy peach and beige mist. It is one of the few genuinely inventive gestures in his entire late portrait output, and also one of the strangest.

The Fagens, by every account devoted admirers of Dalí who filled their Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired home with his work, nonetheless found both portraits too bold to display prominently. Mildred's was relegated to a curved hallway leading to the bedrooms, and Abel's fared no better, kept out of sight in the family's private study rather than hung among the couple's other trophies. A husband and wife who admired the artist enough to commission two portraits and still could not bring themselves to put either one in the living room is its own quiet form of controversy.

New York socialite Ruth Lachman, whose second husband Charles Lachman had co-founded Revlon decades earlier, commissioned Dalí in 1960 for a portrait that would eventually include, per a separate signed agreement, a companion piece of her two children. That second painting never materialized, and given how the first one turned out, it is not hard to guess why. Dalí rendered Lachman in a low-cut red dress against a stormy sky, her body angled away from the viewer, her expression fixed somewhere between irritation and open suspicion.

The unflattering treatment did not stop at expression. One of Lachman's ears appears visibly distorted on the final canvas, twisted into a shape closer to a knotted pretzel than an earlobe, an oddity even by Dalí's loosening technique in this period. The result was so unwelcome that the family never exhibited or published the portrait at all. It sat out of public view for more than fifty years until it finally surfaced at auction in 2012, making it one of the most literally suppressed portraits Dalí ever painted for an American patron.

The son of society royalty C.Z. Guest and polo champion Winston Guest, Alexander Guest was four years old when his parents commissioned Dalí to paint him, flush with confidence after the artist's celebrated 1958 portrait of his mother. What they received instead was a small, loosely rendered canvas in which the boy's head appears noticeably oversized for his frame, his features slightly off-axis from an unconvincing three-quarter turn. Dalí was famously indifferent to children as sitters, and it shows.

The Guests did not soften their reaction for posterity. Decades later, in a 2001 interview, C.Z. Guest recalled that Dalí had given her son what looked like "a harelip and a huge head," comparing the likeness to one of the court dwarfs in a Velázquez painting, and confirmed that her husband simply refused to accept the finished commission. It remains the one portrait on this list with a documented, on-record parental rejection rather than quiet disappointment or decades of storage, and Dalí kept the canvas himself for the rest of his life before bequeathing it to his own foundation. Few society portraits end with the patron's family walking away entirely, which is exactly what makes this the most controversial of the seven.

Dalí's American portraits have spent decades sitting in private collections, family hallways, and the occasional closet, largely absent from the retrospectives that made his Surrealist masterworks famous. What emerges once the contracts, letters, and family recollections are put back together is a far messier and more human record than the polished mythology around Dalí the showman ever allowed, one where wealthy patrons paid handsomely for a masterpiece and sometimes got a private joke at their own expense instead.

©ArtRKL® LLC 2021-2026. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. ArtRKL® and its underscore design indicate trademarks of ArtRKL® LLC and its subsidiaries.