In the eyes of a Cornish artist, Gordon Brown was receiving a good hiding from a “Cameron” long before this month’s General Election.

The face of the little boy in an oil painting entitled Naughty Gordon was eerily familiar to most, if not all, observers when it was placed on the rostrum at The Penzance Auction House. And some 70 buyers laughed even more heartily when they saw the name of the artist – Zoe Cameron – who had created the oil painting depicting a woman giving the miniature Gordon Brown figure a good spanking.

Ironically, one man who didn’t immediately see the joke was the auctioneer, David Lay, who has freely admitted: “It was weird. I just didn’t get it at first. I was totally mystified by all the laughter until I eventually worked it out.”

And if the woman in the picture also looked a bit familiar, that was no accident either – the model was the artist herself, who lives and works at St Martin near Helston.

Zoe said: “This work is one of a series of recent oil paintings with social comment that I have called my Modern Fables, about our society and those in the public eye.

“Political protest can be found in the work of historical British figurative painters for example Hogarth, but not so much recently. So I decided to return to the theme.

“I wanted to create a ‘look’ seen in Newlyn school paintings, a group of painters that I much admire. So I put a mother figure and two children in a rather empty room, with natural light and a bit of drama going on. The story we see being played out can be read on different levels of course."

She added that to paint herself she sat in her envisaged pose before a mirror and put a pillow across her knee for the little Gordon!

Zoe (no relation to David Cameron) completed Naughty Gordon in April last year.

David Lay said: “Alas, Naughty Gordon didn’t reach its reserve price of £4,000, which was perhaps not entirely surprising in the current political climate. “Zoe is a much sought-after artist, but for all that and the undoubted quality of this painting it is arguably one that very few people would currently want to have hanging on their wall!”

  • Zoe has returned to the theme of Fables for an exhibition of new work which opens on September 18 at The Art Room, Topsham near Exeter. This time it is Aesop’s Fables, which she mixes with childhood memory and theatre.

“There is not a politican in sight,” she said, “although one could say that the messages within could still apply.”