Three years after leaving in tense times, Dalton McGuinty is coming back to Queen’s Park. Permanently.

His official portrait will be unveiled Tuesday and hung outside Premier Kathleen Wynne’s office in a hallway that’s home to two other paintings by the same artist, Istvan Nyikos, who painted former Progressive Conservative premiers Bill Davis and Mike Harris.

McGuinty is his first Liberal premier but Nyikos, who left Hungary as a refugee in 1967 and studied at what is now the Ontario College of Art and Design, says he wouldn’t touch politics with a 10-foot paint brush.

“It’s none of my business. As a taxpayer, maybe, but not as an artist,” he quips from his Collingwood studio.

In fact, Nyikos — who has also painted four speakers of the legislature, six chief court justices and former governor general Ray Hnatyshyn, to name just a few — prefers not to know his subjects too well.

“I take the face value, literally, of what the people give me . . . a superficial knowledge is good enough.”

Nyikos adds, tellingly: “I can’t paint my wife or my family. I’m too close to them. I love them. I know them too well.”

He has several sittings with each subject, sketching or painting the face and taking photographs of hands and other details. He works from those over the course of six to eight weeks, often painting several portraits concurrently.

Nyikos says his clients, who may well have ruffled feathers in their professional lives, are unfailingly polite as they make small talk.

“I try to paint them at their best.”

Davis, who left office in 1985, sits smiling in a chair, cross-legged, showing off his trademark ankle boots, holding a pipe and wearing trillium cufflinks. Harris is depicted in a suit, right hand on a chair with a woodland scene behind and looking more svelte than when he retired in 2002.

The McGuinty portrait remains a secret until Tuesday, but Nyikos offers that Ontario’s 24th premier is perched on the edge of his desk.

“He’s a tall guy and he wasn’t quite comfortable. I hope people don’t notice. I am happy with the painting,” he says of a premier who announced his resignation in 2012 amid a furor over two gas-fired power plants cancelled before the 2011 election.

“It’s a very relaxed-looking position, but it’s not quite relaxed enough.”

Inevitably, the unveiling will be rife with jokes about hanging former premiers, given that politicians don’t always leave office on a high note.

McGuinty recalls the night his predecessor, Ernie Eves, returned to slip the cover off his own portrait in 2009. A longtime MPP and later finance minister, Eves became premier after Harris stepped down in 2002.

“I was very complimentary to him and was surprised when he took some thinly veiled shots at me (and others) in his own speech,” McGuinty wrote in his recent memoir, Making a Difference, describing Eves as having “a chip on his shoulder.”

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Coincidentally, the unveiling takes place the night before the second court date of McGuinty’s two former top aides, chief of staff David Livingston and deputy chief Laura Miller.

They face criminal charges of breach of trust, mischief in relation to data and misuse of a computer system following a lengthy Ontario Provincial Police investigation into deleted emails.

Livingston and Miller deny any wrongdoing. McGuinty co-operated with the police investigation and was not a suspect.

Read more about: