From the Publisher

By Louis A. Weil III

How do you capture the face of a man who has not been seen in public for the past 27 years? Ask artist Paul Davis, who painted this week's cover of Nelson Mandela. No new pictures of the African National Congress leader have been available since the early 1960s. Relatively few people know what he looks like today.

Davis began with an old Mandela picture, imagining how decades of hard time would change him. Four years ago, TIME commissioned Davis to paint Mandela as a young man. We sent a copy to South Africa for suggestions on how he had changed. Johannesburg bureau chief Scott MacLeod, who wrote this week's cover, showed it to Mandela associates. Using their comments as a guide, Davis painted a portrait of an older Mandela, his hair flecked with gray. Then we faxed a copy of this version to MacLeod, who showed it to Winnie Mandela. "It was like the way police artists work," Davis explains. "You add to the picture and then ask, Is this right? Is there more of this or more of that?"

Of the various renditions, Mrs. Mandela said the unfinished portrait was "the nearest likeness to today's Mandela." But she thought his face was too round, although Davis had caught the hardness in his eyes. Said she: "Years of suffering you can't take away. That expression he did not have before prison."

So Davis created a third portrait of Mandela on a midnight Friday deadline. "This was unlike anything I have ever done before," says the artist, who also illustrated TIME's covers of Captain Joseph Hazelwood and Bernhard Goetz. "Usually there is a lot more information to work with. But the problem is still the basic one: How do you create a portrait faithful to the person?"

And what of the man behind the painting? MacLeod, who interviewed Mandela's comrades from Britain to Africa, says, "I came away impressed by how this man burdened with problems has remained very much the head of his family. Even from prison, he managed to buy and wrap Christmas presents -- a box of chocolates for his wife and earrings for his daughter."