“Blair sits uneasy and exhausted in a shadowy interior in Hale’s painting, in a dark suit and without a tie. The unbuttoned shirt is apparently a break with protocol for parliamentary portraits, but this portrait is unbuttoned in other ways too. Blair looks gloomily away from the artist, fixed on thoughts of his own; he doesn’t conceal age, or exhaustion, or care. It’s a melancholy rather than triumphal image.”