Encomium or insult, tribute or travesty; the line between portrait and caricature can be a very fine one. Readers who know me personally may believe the scribble atop this column to be a dead ringer for its author. Or they may consider it a cruel and misleading lampoon. On the basis that some stones are better left unturned I’ve never asked them. But having lost a bit of weight in the years since it was drawn, I have sometimes considered updating it. Not least because the hope which inspired it – that attractive female readers might confess to being pleasantly surprised when they meet me in the flesh – has never borne fruit. But drawing a more flattering picture of myself might say something about me which is even less attractive. Vanity is more forgivable in women, of course. At our editor’s behest I once drew a by-line cartoon of another Speccie columnist, and since that person fell indisputably into the attractive female category, I took pains to do her looks justice – to the point where I worried it might look more fawning than faithful. It was a great surprise, then, when she asked for it not to be used because ‘it makes me look like a rabbit’.

Gina Rinehart may think that Vincent Namatjira’s portrait of her makes her look like an animal of some kind. But knowing her love of all things Australian, I doubt she would have been offended if Mr Namatjira had imbued her with the characteristics of an indigenous species; the chubby cheerfulness of a wombat, for example, or the hugability of a koala, or even – given her instinct for the market – the cold-eyed ruthlessness of a saltie. Kerry Packer, another powerful but not famously beautiful Australian, is said not to have been displeased when newspaper reports covering the Costigan tax enquiry started referring to him as The Goanna. Needless to say, the Namatjira portrait certainly looks more like a human being than any marsupial, rodent or reptile. But that’s where the similarity with Australia’s wealthiest woman ends. If the artist had not painted his subject’s name above her head, I wouldn’t have been able to identify her if I’d been made to sit in front of it for a year. And the same could be said about almost all the other canvases which make up Mr Namatjira’s celebrity portrait collective. Only one of them is instantly recognisable without recourse to the name daubed helpfully above its head – and that’s because that head is wearing a crown. Fortunately, we will never know what our late queen would have thought of Mr Namatjira’s talents. Just as we never really knew what she thought of the official portraits she sat for when she was alive. The only one with which she evinced obvious satisfaction was, in fact, painted by an Australian. But as he was imprisoned for sexually assaulting children a few years later we can take only qualified pride in this.

In responding to the request made by Ms Rinehart’s supporters, the curators of the National Gallery are right to say that they cannot take the painting down ‘simply because she doesn’t like it’. But they would also be right – and only doing the job the taxpayer pays them to do – if they decided, on reflection, to take all twenty-one of Mr Namatjira’s portraits down simply because they’re very bad paintings. They might also concede that their only justification for acquiring them for the National Gallery had been the same justification the Art Gallery of New South Wales had for awarding Mr Namatjira the 2020 Archibald Prize – the event which effectively launched his career. That is, he is a) indigenous and b) related to another, much better indigenous artist whose talents were cynically and shamefully exploited by white people.

In the unlikely event that Vincent Namatjira does ever fall out of favour with the Australian arts establishment, we need not feel sorry for him. He has already made more money than most real artists make in a lifetime, and now that he is himself a celebrity, he won’t be short of offers. Perhaps one day we’ll see him starring in a TV commercial. One which shows him back at his easel, painting a portrait of a beautiful woman who, on seeing the finished work, squirts a tube of paint in his face and storms out in disgust. The ad would then end with a close-up of Mr Namatjira looking very confused as the voice-over delivers the tag line: Should have gone to Specsavers.