Emma Wesley RP

Emma Wesley

Emma Wesley is an award-winning portrait painter who lives and works in London.

Self-taught as an artist, she studied English Literature at Cambridge and Painting Conservation at the Courtauld Institute of Art before beginning a career as a portrait painter in 2003.

Emma has exhibited widely throughout her career, and has shown paintings regularly in the BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery. Emma has twice been awarded the De Laszlo Silver Medal for Portraiture.

Emma has works in many private and public collections, including The National Portrait Gallery; The Royal Society; The Inner Temple; The MCC; The Royal Welch Fusiliers; All Souls College, Oxford; Christ’s, Girton, and Jesus College, Cambridge; The University of East Anglia, and Rugby School.

Image: Emma Wesley RP, Nina Cline

2020 Cover Art for Wes Anderson’s ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ Criterion Collection Re-release

RP Member Emma Wesley was commissioned to create the cover art for Wes Anderson’s ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ Criterion Collection Re-release in 2020. 

" The film takes place in two time periods, the thirties and the sixties, and the idea was to slide off the drab outer cover showing the run-down bathhouse to reveal it in its decadent heyday. My reimagining of the thirties bathhouse takes inspiration from the distinctive colour-scheme and decorative elements used throughout the hotel in the film. The mural here is inspired by Caspar David Friedrich, like those glimpsed in the lobby at the beginning of the film as Ralph Fiennes sweeps through as M. Gustave, the consummate concierge. Here, Wes Anderson asked that M. Gustave be shown in a rare moment of repose, reading poetry in the bath, with a bottle of his habitual l'Air du Panache, and one of the Pouilly-Jouvet '26, to hand."