Winston Churchill: The Painter Exhibition at the Wallace Collection until 29th November
Winston Churchill was so extravagantly gifted as a statesman, orator and writer, it is tempting to assume he must have been no good as a painter.
After all, he only took up painting at the age of 40, referred to his works as “daubs”, and for most of the next half century had many other things to attend to.
During the Second World War, he found time for only one picture, a view of Marrakesh which he painted in January 1943, the day after he took the American President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to admire that particular prospect of the Tower of the Koutoubia Mosque.
This picture, which he gave to FDR as a birthday present, was sold at Christie’s in 2021 for £8.2 million.
The exhibition confirms that Churchill was actually a very good painter. The 58 works in it clear with ease the stiff hurdle set by the question, “Would one want these pictures on one’s own wall?”
These are not the doodles of a dilettante. Churchill took painting with the utmost seriousness, and with proper humility strove to improve his technique by enlisting the help of some of the best artists of the time: Sir John Lavery, William Sickert, Sir William Nicholson.
They were friends as well as mentors. Churchill had the modesty to make himself their apprentice, the audacity to attempt great things, the common sense not to overreach himself, the energy, concentration and gusto required to keep going while working out how to capture the fleeting qualities of an afternoon’s light.
As he recalls in his essay Painting as a Pastime, he was in 1915 at a very low ebb, blamed for the unfolding disaster at Gallipoli:
“When I left the Admiralty at the end of May, 1915, I still remained a member of the Cabinet and of the War Council. In this position I knew everything and could do nothing. The change from the intense executive activities of each day’s work at the Admiralty to the narrowly measured duties of a counsellor left me gasping. Like a sea-beast fished up from the depths, or a diver too suddenly hoisted, my veins threatened to burst from the fall in pressure. I had great anxiety and no means of relieving it; I had vehement convictions and small power to give effect to them.”
He turned to painting for relief after experimenting one Sunday with his children’s paint-box. But having acquired the complete equipment needed to paint in oils, he found himself intimidated by the empty canvas, on which he managed, as he tried to paint the sky, to make “a mark about as big as a bean”.
At that moment Hazel Lavery, wife of John, happened to arrive, and exclaimed:
“‘Painting! But what are you hesitating about? Let me have a brush—the big one.’ Splash into the turpentine, wallop into the blue and the white, frantic flourish on the palette—clean no longer—and then several large, fierce strokes and slashes of blue on the absolutely cowering canvas. Anyone could see that it could not hit back. No evil fate avenged the jaunty violence. The canvas grinned in helplessness before me. The spell was broken. The sickly inhibitions rolled away. I seized the largest brush and fell upon my victim with Berserk fury. I have never felt any awe of a canvas since.”
One of Churchill’s early works was a self-portrait of himself as artist, a gaunt figure on a black background, haunted one guesses by Gallipoli.
But he developed instead into a painter of landscapes and buildings, and especially of light reflected from water: a river, moat, lake, harbour or sea. On rare occasions when the weather drove him indoors, he painted instead the reflections of light on glass or silver.
Some of his early paintings were exhibited under pseudonyms in Paris and in London: no special attention was to be paid to him because he was a well-known public figure.
In this exhibition we are reminded of Churchill the grandee: he paints the Palladian Bridge at Wilton, wonderful light falling through the trees onto the water, the North Porch at Cranborne Manor, the Banqueting Hall at Knebworth, the Lake at Blenheim.
Often he gives these paintings to his hosts, but never do we get from Churchill the artist the faintest hint of hauteur. Here is a great man who wants us to enter into his pleasures, enjoy things as he does, revel in bright colours, the orange of the parasols in the Garden of the Mamounia Hotel, the dash of Cadmium Yellow for a woman in a punt, the vividness of the blues, Cobalt, French Ultramarine, Prussian, and his favourite, Cerulean.
In 1960 he gave the painting of the Palladian Bridge to Queen Elizabeth II, who said in her thank-you letter: “What a truly lovely place Wilton is and you have captured the feeling and pleasure of being there so well that all can feel it too.”
He stayed with friends at many wonderful houses in the south of France. We are given the Mediterranean seen through trees (see the picture at the top of this review, used on the cover of the admirable catalogue), the River Loup (a brilliant picture, chosen by Sir John Rothenstein for the Tate – one should expand this reproduction of it to get a better impression of how wonderful the greens are), the harbour at Cannes, its waters portrayed by applying “innumerable small separate lozenge-shaped points and patches of colour – often pure colour – so it looks more like a tessellated pavement than a marine picture.”
Churchill fell in love with Morocco, which he painted again and again. In 1958 an acclaimed exhibition of 35 of his pictures was taken on a World Tour of America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
That was followed in 1959 by an exhibition of 62 pictures, including the World Tour ones, at the Royal Academy in London, where a visitor was heard to exclaim, “What lovely holidays he must have had!”
Churchill had lovely holidays, but not of the kind where one does nothing. He painted with total concentration, and all his cares fell away.
There is no necessary connection between being a good painter and a good leader, but Churchill’s artistic success does remind us of some of the qualities he brought to politics.
One sees his determination to learn from the best people – Lavery, Sickert, Nicholson – and also at one remove from the French Impressionists such as Manet and Monet, Cézanne and Matisse, who in Churchill’s words “brought back to the pictorial art a new draught of joie de vivre.”
One sees too what would now be called his inclusiveness, his desire to make everyone welcome, and his openness to new methods.
Successful paintings require close observation of how the world actually is: so too successful politics.
Churchill saw what was happening in the 1930s in Nazi Germany, at a time when others kept their eyes tight shut.
Both art and politics entail self-revelation. To make a connection with the wider public, you have to be willing to reveal yourself, and by doing this you make yourself vulnerable, which demands courage.
Do not be put off by these abstract reflections. Buy a ticket and see the actual pictures. They are to be found in the basement of the Wallace Collection, and look very good there, despite being deprived of the natural light which meant so much to Churchill.
He would, I think, approve of being placed beneath the stupendous treasures of the permanent collection. For both as an artist and as a politician, he knew it was quite intolerable to go round telling people how wonderful one is.
