“What a moment for me,” said Tony Bennett, as his painting of Duke Ellington was officially accepted into the National Portrait Gallery on Wednesday morning — the 110th anniversary of the Duke’s birth. “It’s something I never dreamed about, and it came true.”
The portrait depicts U Street’s favorite son surrounded by a sea of pink roses. Why? Bennett explained that every time Ellington wrote a new song for Bennett to sing, he’d send him a dozen roses. “When the dozen roses would arrive, I’d say, ‘Duke wrote another song,'” recalled the 82-year-old crooner.
In fact, Bennett said, it was Ellington who inspired him to start painting. “Do two things; don’t do one,” Ellington instructed Bennett, who said that advice “changed my whole life for the better.”
After the morning press conference, the portrait was hung in what Martin Sullivan, the head of the Portrait Gallery, called a “place of honor” in the Hall of New Arrivals — just opposite, it so happens, Shep Fairey’s now-iconic portrait of President Barack Obama.
That’s perfectly suitable for Bennett, who said of the new president, “I love everything he’s done and everything he’s doing. … He’s so intelligent and such a great orator.”
Bennett’s Ellington is his third work accepted by the Smithsonian Institution. The others are a portrait of Ella Fitzgerald that hangs in the National Museum of American History and a landscape of New York’s Central Park that’s on display in the National Museum of American Art.
