During the lowest moment of his long slog to become House speaker in 2023, Representative Kevin McCarthy sat in his office listening to the Republican standing in his way rattle off a long list of demands.
“Matt, it sounds like you want to be speaker,” Mr. McCarthy told Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida.
“You’ll get the portrait,” Mr. Gaetz fired back.
“I’ve got a lot of pictures of myself; I don’t need a portrait,” Mr. McCarthy said, using an expletive, before angrily tossing Mr. Gaetz out of his office.
But on Tuesday, Mr. McCarthy — who made history both as the man who took the most ballots to be elected speaker and the first speaker to be ousted from the post — got the official portrait marking his short and tumultuous tenure after all.
The gold-framed painting, an oil-on-linen by the artist Chas Fagan, was unveiled on Tuesday afternoon during an elaborate ceremony in Statuary Hall attended by Cabinet officials and members of Congress past and present.
Mr. McCarthy served as speaker for just 269 days, but his portrait will now hang in the Capitol in perpetuity. It is a testament to the brief, strange tenure of a Republican who served as a bridge between the establishment-led G.O.P. and the party it became after being fully subsumed by President Trump.
The portrait, which shows Mr. McCarthy standing by an open window with a slight smile on his face, captures his sunny personality and optimistic outlook, which he kept up even while proving himself to be a glutton for political punishment.
Mr. McCarthy, a mainstream Republican who was blamed for helping to rehabilitate Mr. Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol by flying to Mar-a-Lago and posing with him for a photograph, left Congress before Mr. Trump returned to power. (Mr. Gaetz left soon after.)
Mr. McCarthy’s tenure in leadership and the issues he was forced to deal with — a debt ceiling negotiation with President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and multiple spending fights that divided his own party — seemed like they belonged to another era as former colleagues gathered on Tuesday to honor him.
First elected to Congress in 2007, Mr. McCarthy, a proud Californian, was the party’s strongest fund-raiser in the House and spent two election cycles helping to build the Republican majority that ultimately rejected him as its leader.
“Everyone got to witness his legendary tolerance for pain,” former Representative Patrick McHenry, the North Carolina Republican who served as interim speaker after Mr. McCarthy’s ouster and his longtime confidant, said in his remarks. “Few people have sacrificed more for House Republicans over the past two decades than the man sitting before us today.”
An elegant program distributed to attendees memorialized that pain as a virtue in a brief biography: “In January 2023, Mr. McCarthy won the speakership after a historic 15 ballots,” it said.
Among his achievements, it listed securing “$2 trillion in deficit reduction, all while protecting the full faith and credit of the United States” — a rosy description for a debt ceiling deal that averted a federal default but reduced deficits by about half that amount. It also credited Mr. McCarthy for “keeping our government funded and making sure our troops were paid,” the bare minimum that is expected of Congress, but tasks that proved to be steep challenges while overseeing a tiny and fractious majority.
Despite Mr. McCarthy famously tripping over his words and often speaking in word salads, Mr. McHenry said that he demonstrated a “mastery” of politics, leverage and people.
Also in attendance at the portrait unveiling: John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director; Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, as well as his predecessor Kristi Noem; Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina; Representative Steny H. Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland; and the former White House budget director, Mick Mulvaney, among others.
The walls of the speaker’s lobby — a long, carpeted corridor outside the House chamber where members gather between votes — feature the portraits of more than 20 former speakers. Several more hang in the halls around the Capitol.
The tradition of hanging portraits dates to 1852, with the donation of a portrait of Henry Clay, who served as speaker three times, from the artist Giuseppe Fagnani. The House began mandating oil paintings of speakers in 1910.
Mr. McCarthy may have told Mr. Gaetz that he did not care about the portrait, but on Tuesday he choked up as he thanked his friends and former constituents for the honor.
“I loved every minute of every day I was able to serve,” he said.
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