Lily Allen’s ‘West End Girl’ Portrait Makes Its Museum Debut

• Lily Allen’s album cover painting has gone on view at London’s National Portrait Gallery.
• Spanish artist Nieves González’s portrait blends Old Master styles with contemporary fashion, featuring puffer-clad figures.
• The painting, owned by Allen, marks González’s first appearance in a major British museum.

Lily Allen paid a visit to London’s National Portrait Gallery last night to celebrate the public debut of the iconic artwork that graces the cover of her much-discussed latest release, West End Girl.

The record caused quite the stir when it dropped last fall. Across 45 minutes, it divulges the dirty details of Allen’s split from her former husband, American actor David Harbour—with a dash of fiction, Allen said. The cover art, by Spanish painter Nieves González, has garnered its fair share of attention, too.

The pop star’s creative director Leith Clark organized the commission for West End Girl via Instagram. “The response was very intense,” González recently told Artnet News’s Katie White. “I received thousands of messages from people around the world telling me how much they liked the image.” While the portrait captures all the glamour and ennui of Allen’s album, it also epitomizes motifs from González’s practice—namely her affinity for immortalizing women wearing contemporary puffer coats in the style of Spain’s Old Masters.

Allen has owned the artwork ever since. A representative from the National Portrait Gallery told me that Allen reached out offering to loan it to the storied institution. “The National Portrait Gallery’s Collection celebrates the people who have shaped our history and culture, and Lily Allen is undoubtedly one of the defining voices of her generation,” said Victoria Siddall, the National Portrait Gallery’s first female leader, in press materials.

The National Portrait Gallery already owns two odes to Allen—one photograph that Venetia Dearden shot in 2007, the year after Allen dropped her most famous album, Alright, Still, and another that Nadav Kander captured in 2008, around the time Allen recorded her sophomore EP, It’s Not Me It’s You.

Neither of those photographs are on display, though. Luckily, Allen’s West End Girl portrait is slated to hang in Room 30 on the museum’s second floor for the next year—alongside a digital video of a sleeping David Beckham by filmmaker Sam Taylor-Johnson; an oil painting honoring Amy Winehouse by the most expensive female artist alive, Marlene Dumas; and a self-portrait by noted rule-breaker David Hockney. The arrival of Allen’s portrait marks the first time fans can see it in person. It’s also the first time González’s work has appeared in a major British museum; the artist called the occasion “overwhelming.”