British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s mother died on Monday at the age of 79.
Famous portrait painter Charlotte Johnson Wahl died “suddenly and peacefully” at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, according to the London Times obituary.
Boris Johnson previously described his mother as the “highest authority” of his family. In a speech at the 2019 Conservative Conference, the mother said she taught him “equal importance, equal dignity, equal value for all human beings on the planet.”
Sir Kiel Starmer, the leader of the main opposition Labor Party, was one of the first politicians to express his condolences.
“I am very sorry to know the disappearance of the Prime Minister. I would like to express my condolences to him and his family,” he wrote on Twitter.
Please accept my sincere condolences @BorisJohnson About the death of his mother Charlotte Johnson Wahl. Parents are the most important people in our lives. Our idea lies in the prime minister’s family. pic.twitter.com/DdX5bTFbuZ
— British Russian Embassy (@RussianEmbassy) September 14, 2021
Born in 1942, Johnson Wall was the daughter of Sir James Fawcett, a barrister who chaired the European Commission of Human Rights in the 1970s.
She studied English at Oxford University, but interrupted her education to travel to the United States with Stanley Johnson, who married in 1963. She later earned her degree as the first married female undergraduate student at her college, Lady Margaret Hall.
Before divorcing in 1979, the couple had four children: Boris, journalist Rachel, former minister Joe, and environmentalist Leo.
In the years following her divorce, she refused to accept money from her ex-husband and made a living by selling paintings. She later remembered that she was “very hard”.
As an artist, she made her name as a portrait painter, but she was also known for her landscape paintings.
she said Telegraph 2015: “My sister was as terribly smart as my brother. My parents didn’t know what to do with me, so they gave me some paint, and I I found that I was good at it. I couldn’t stop when I started. “
In 1988, she married an American professor, Nicholas Wall, and moved to New York, but returned to London after her death in 1996.
While in New York, she began painting the cityscape, which was the subject of a sold-out exhibition in 2004.
At the age of 40, she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, but she never forgave the illness to prevent her from painting, and she settled on a walker while working.
In 2015, she was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at Mall Galleries in London.
PA contributed to this report.
