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Jason Bouldin '89, a painter like his father before him, executed the portrait, below right, of former president Derek Bok. The painting was officially unveiled October 5. Photograph by John Nordell

President Derek Bok sat for two formal oil portraits in the early years of his administration. These now hang in the Harvard Clubs of New York and Boston. But the University has never had a portrait of Bok to hang in the Faculty Room at University Hall. To remedy this situation, Rev. Peter Gomes, the Plummer professor of Christian morals, took the former president to lunch and appealed to his sense of duty. Gomes told Bok, who didn't particularly want to sit for a third portrait, "You really ought to do this for Harvard." An astonished Bok replied, "Haven't I done enough for Harvard?"

At Gomes's suggestion, the portrait was executed by Jason Bouldin '89. Gomes, who describes one of Bouldin's undergraduate successes in portraiture as "painterly in the best sense of the word, in the tradition of John Singer Sargent," thought it worth giving the commission to a young person who had been a student when Bok was president.

Courtesy of the Harvard University Art Museums

Bouldin, an Oxford, Mississippi, native, whose father has painted President Neil L. Rudenstine, spent one day with Bok doing the prep work for the painting. Subsequently, he worked from photographs and sketches. Bouldin says he set out to paint "a humble man of strength and integrity. The challenge was to convey that he had been the head of a major university for 20 years."

Bouldin prepared a full-size charcoal sketch of his work as a gift to the Boks. The finished portrait, ocially unveiled October 5, shows the post-presidential Bok sitting in a Harvard chair-next to the president's chair in which those in oce are often depicted. Gomes calls the work "a glorious document of the mature achievement of his administration."

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