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Stephen Hawking by Tai-Shan Schierenberg (Courtesy: Royal Society)
By Hamish Johnston
Stephen Hawking was in London yesterday to unveil this portrait of himself at the Royal Society.
The painting is by the English artist Tai-Shan Schierenberg, who also has four works just down the road in the National Portrait Gallery.
If you happen to visit the Royal Society, make sure you make time for organization’s fantastic collection of portraits. You can admire likenesses of John Flamsteed, who founded the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, the great Victorian scientist Michael Faraday — and even the mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, who was famously vilified by Isaac Newton and the Royal Society.
And apparently, there is a portrait of Newton but I haven’t managed to come across it.
One of the things that are so amazing about this portrait is how –in crude, energetic strokes– Tai-Shan was able to grasp Hawking’s brilliance and his broad vision of the world in his look.
Tai-Shan Schierenberg did an impressive portrait of Professor Hawking. I congratulated him as a portrait painter myself who met Professor Hawking to do his portrait a few months before. I couldn’t imagine a fair portrait of Hawking without his life-time obsession: science. I therefore tried to include in my portrait such concepts as Einstein’s General relativity while struggling with Quantum mechanics. Time is the essence in Hawking’s research and it is central in my portrait (Newtonian time as “Big Ben” being affected by the galaxy’s Black Hole in the backdrop).
Well done Tai!
As Rodolfo says, the look is most impressive in this portrait of Stephen Hawking!