Vanity is not yet dead in the City. Financiers have been commissioning nude portraits of their wives made from collages of newspaper clippings telling the stories of their own financial conquests.

Natasha Archdale, a model turned artist, tears strips from the City news pages that tell of the big deals to incorporate into paintings that cost up to £15,000 a time.

Archdale, 32, began using pink shreds of newspapers to match her own flesh tones when she was stuck in hospital for six weeks after a car crash and, as she was bored, decided to create a self-portrait.

With no paint at hand, she ripped up a copy of the Financial Times, borrowed glue from her nurse and stuck the pieces on her picture to give shading and contours. From this bedside doodling has grown a lucrative career in which she uses newsprint to turn her paintings into collages using the likes of the Financial Times and The New York Times pasted onto nudes.

In one commission Dorrit Moussaieff, the wife of the president of Iceland, was seated naked apart from a pair of gloves and a hat created from cuttings showing banknotes.

Archdale is finding that the City crash has brought a new form of financial schadenfreude from bankers keen to celebrate the demise of rivals.

“I am getting new commissions from people who want to mark these times,” she said last week.

“One wants all the cuttings about the collapse of Lehman Brothers imposed on a picture of a naked model. I can’t possibly mention names but he is a rival banker.

“For a British banker who deals in Latin America I found articles ranging from the price of tortillas rising in Mexico to the fall of a bank in Brazil.”

She added: “I suppose it is the ultimate ego boost for some of these guys to have a picture of their wife naked with stories about their boardroom successes pasted over the nude.

“But with the current status of the markets there is an incredible amount of material for me. It is fun for me to make the pictures topical. ”

Sometimes the client hands Archdale a file of cuttings to be incorporated in the picture. Otherwise she uses internet search engines and newspaper archives to find cuttings, although old editions can cost her as much as £30. Each picture takes about a month to complete.

She is preparing a picture of Nelson Mandela at 90 to be auctioned in aid of charity and is about to embark on a portrait of James Blunt, the singer.

Archdale, who works from a studio at her home in Notting Hill, west London, is being courted by art dealers including Harry Blain, who sells some of Damien Hirst’s work.

Blain, who co-founded the Haunch of Venison gallery in central London, said: “ It is very interesting, particularly with what we are going through right now.”

Archdale’s clients include Moussaieff, the Israeli-born British socialite who married Ólafur Ragnar GrÍmsson, the president of Iceland, in 2003. She has her own naked picture and also commissioned an Archdale portrait as a gift for Stephen Schwarzman, the billionaire chairman of Blackstone Group, the American private equity firm. It featured his wife Christine.

Moussaieff said: “I have yet to meet someone who does not want a naked picture of their loved ones with text about themselves.” David Yarrow, founder of Clareville Capital, a hedge fund, commissioned a naked portrait of himself to hang in his weekend cottage in Devon.

He said: “What good use of the newspapers. She put the FT cuttings about me in some very naughty parts. It makes a good present for people but maybe they will never want to read the FT again. I am glad to see the price of her work is going up. I might have to flog mine. I might need to.”

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