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President Donald Trump liked his painting so much that he was drinking with Abraham Lincoln, Richard Nixon and Teddy Roosevelt to the point of calling the artist on the phone and then putting an impression on the White House.
Called "The Republican Club", the copy of 10 Republican Presidents sitting around a table briefly appears in the background of Trump's interview with "60 minutes" on Sunday, and a picture of this moment has become viral on social media.
While all this was going on, Andy Thomas was at his home in Carthage, Missouri, watching Kansas City leaders play the New England patriots on television while he was working on a painting of A train flight in the old west. (This is one of his favorite subjects: "A lot of horses, a lot of action.")
Thomas's phone started ringing, while friends had contacted him, but he assumed they were just investigators asking questions about the Missouri Senate race. Eventually, his wife came to show him the computer.
"I was ecstatic," he told TIME later. "Often, the gifts are not really hanging, they are simply placed somewhere in a closet. Discovering that it is actually suspended is really a treat. "
Read more: There is a subtle feminist message in this new Trump painting
It is unclear how the print arrived at the White House, but Thomas said Republican Rep. Darrell Issa of California had recently announced that he would show it to Trump.
Thomas is not a very political man, but he did a portrait of Issa a few years ago and the two kept in touch. But he was surprised two weeks ago when he arrived after mowing the lawn and his wife and business partner, Dina, told him that Trump would call shortly.
"Basically, he said," Most portraits of me really do not please me, "Thomas said," and he's right, he's hard to paint, there are bad ones.
As he often does, Trump then asked Thomas how he behaved as president and what his friends and neighbors thought of him, as well as how he thought the Senate race between Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill and the Republican Pro-Trump Josh Hawley was going to end.
Thomas said that he was a little surprised at the turn of the conversation.
"I think," I'm a damn artist, why is he asking me about it? ", He recalls.
As a cowboy painter who engages in presidential portraits, Thomas said it was good to hear about one of his subjects directly. He had already met a cousin of Bill Clinton who had told him that he liked the portrait, and the niece of Richard Nixon had once rented his painting.
But Thomas was proud that Trump recognized the work he had done on one of the most difficult parts of the painting: the president's smile.
He said he found that some presidents had a natural smile: Ronald Reagan, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Barack Obama. But others, like Trump, have a forced campaign smile that does not look perfect in a painting. He had a hard time convincing Nixon the first time he painted it.
To make Trump smile, Thomas said he had looked at thousands of photos.
"Trump has that peculiarity: he has his chin up and smiles really big, it's great for a caricature, but not necessarily flattering for him," he said. "I had to find a picture where he seemed to have heard something funny, so it looks like a real smile."
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