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If the portrait of Ted Turner unveiled this week at the National Portrait Gallery is any indication, the businessman doesn’t want to be remembered foremost as the founder of CNN and the crafter of a cable news empire. He is painted on horseback amid the bison and foothill grasslands of his ranch in southwest Montana. The electric-colored backdrop gives no nod to the industry he upended on the East Coast that made his name and his riches. It's instead an homage to his later move Westward, sweeping up huge swaths of American range.

Commemorative portraiture like this is an odd thing: The artwork stands in the nation’s gallery as a giant image of yourself, hardened in brightly saturated oils, on display to a crowd of colleagues and cameras. The rugged backdrop for the portrait was Turner's directive, and its commissioning was a deliberate effort to shape what, for posterity, the American public most remembers about him.

Turner's family, along with the UN Foundation, to which Turner donated $1 billion, hatched the idea to get a painting of him into the National Portrait Gallery. He selected the artist Jon Friedman, whose similarly bold oil-on-canvas of Bill and Melinda Gates already hangs there. In that one, a monitor displaying images from the Gates Foundation hints at both the technology and philanthropy that has defined Bill Gates's career.

Turner chose Friedman in part for his portfolio of big-name portraiture and because several of his previous paintings had appeased the museum's board of commissioners, which decides whether gifted portraits will be accepted into the collection.

Since merging Turner Broadcasting System with Time Warner nearly 20 years ago, Turner has focused much of his energy and wealth on the environment, global health and security, and his more than 2 million acres of land. At 76, he is now the second-largest private landowner in the United States. The last installment of his $1 billion donation to the UN was made this year. Yet to many, he is still known less as a philanthropist than as the godfather of CNN.

According to Brandon Fortune, chief curator at the National Portrait Gallery, it is rare for a painting’s subject to orchestrate a gift this way and to be present at the museum’s unveiling. For Turner, and those close to him, it is an opportunity to actively sketch the contours of his legacy as the years count up. The painting is a six-by-four-and-a-half-foot vision of what he wants that to be: an icon in the tradition of philanthropist-tycoons like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie.

“The man and his country, an American classic,” says Kathy Calvin, president and chief executive of the UN Foundation.

“The great American humanitarian,” says Rutherford Seydel, Turner's son-in-law and general counsel.

The image being crafted, both visually and metaphorically, strategically echoes the cover and title of the cable mogul's recent authorized biography, "Last Stand: Ted Turner's Quest to Save a Troubled Planet." That, too, shows Turner, wearing a cowboy hat and leading a horse, against a similar backdrop of green meadows, snowcapped mountains and cerulean sky.

Given that new technologies like streaming threaten to overtake the once-revolutionary cable model that Turner made big, he may be wise to use his later years shaping a different association. He no longer holds a position with Turner Broadcasting System, and lost roughly $8 billion when the stock plummeted after a subsequent merger with AOL, though he is still among the wealthiest living Americans.

If Turner's portrait is a window into how he wants to be remembered, it's perhaps also a window into the wishes and fears that occupy many of us as we get older. The difference, of course, is that far fewer of us can commission the image that's catalogued.

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Lillian Cunningham is the editor and feature writer for The Washington Post's 'On Leadership' section.

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assistant: Painting Ted Turner’s legacy