Angela Merkel unveils her official portrait for the Chancellery gallery at Berlin's Bode Museum
The former German chancellor introduced the oil painting by Franco-German artist Jérémie Queyras, 28, at the Bode Museum on Tuesday evening. It will stay on public view until October before joining the gallery of predecessors at the Chancellery.
The unveiling event
Angela Merkel cut a blue ribbon on Tuesday evening in the exhibition hall of Berlin’s Bode Museum to reveal the state portrait that will eventually hang alongside those of her male predecessors in the Chancellery. The 71-year-old former chancellor, who led Germany for 16 years, had taken her time after leaving office before settling on the work. The painting, 110 by 140 centimetres, was met with keen anticipation: Merkel is the first woman and first East German to join the Kanzlergalerie.
The artist and the sitter
Merkel chose Jérémie Queyras, a little-known Franco-German painter from Freiburg, who had applied on his own initiative. Queyras, who also plays the cello and comes from a family of musicians, has no fixed style and paints live on stage at music sessions. The ex-chancellor told Die Zeit that she had seen none of his original works beforehand; she was drawn to his perspective as a man 40 years her junior, curious about how a young artist would look at someone with “over 70 years of life and 30 years of active politics behind her,” as she put it. Sittings began in the summer of 2025 in a studio set up in Berlin and stretched over several months.
<quote author="Angela Merkel">I immediately found it exciting to make this painting accessible to a broader part of the public first. Whether people take advantage of it, we will see.
A portrait in detail
Queyras’s composition centres on a royal blue blazer that dominates the canvas, its hue so saturated that an earlier version was reportedly even brighter. Merkel stands, leaning slightly on an armchair, her gaze steady and serious, an amber necklace glinting at her throat. Unlike many of her sitting predecessors, she is depicted upright, a stance Spiegel interpreted as a refusal to “make herself comfortable.” The iconic diamond hand gesture is absent. The result, several observers noted, is conventional in style, surprising for so young an artist, yet also distinctly Merkel: a blend of queenly composure and matter-of-factness.
A neighbourly choice of venue
The Bode Museum sits on the Museumsinsel, almost opposite Merkel’s apartment. She recalled visiting it as a teenager when she came to see her grandmother in the Pankow district (an expedition that ended badly once after missing a late-night bus from the opera). Helmut Kohl had unveiled his own official portrait at the grander Neue Nationalgalerie in 2003; Merkel, by contrast, opted for the quieter Bode, joking that the loan “will certainly do the museum good.”
<quote author="Jérémie Queyras">I hope that museum visitors recognise you straight away and at the same time get to know you from a different side.
From museum to Chancellery
The painting will stay at the Bode Museum until October, giving the public a rare pre-Chancellery look. Merkel remarked that becoming history feels strange, adding with her characteristic pragmatism: “So I’ll be hanging there.” The work will then take its place in the official gallery, completing a collection that began with Konrad Adenauer.
