One million pounds for a landscape with some sheep, painted by an amateur artist, may strike some as rather on the high side; but that was the winning bid at a recent auction at Sotheby’s in London.
Then again, the amateur in question was Winston Churchill, and the view that of his beloved country estate Chartwell in Kent. He had given the painting to Henry Luce, who had serialized his wartime memoirs in Life, and the price was no fluke: Churchill’s paintings have doubled in value over the past decade, which would no doubt have pleased him. Painting was important to Churchill: “If it weren’t for painting, I could not live,” he once noted. “I could not bear the strain of things.”
In his long essay “Painting as a Pastime,” Churchill recounts how he took it up in 1915 at the age of 40 after being sacked from the Admiralty after Gallipoli. Demoted to a sinecure in the cabinet with no influence on the conduct of the war, he was sulking at a country retreat in Surrey he had rented for his family. Here he found his sister-in-law painting in the garden, and after experimenting a little with the children’s paint box, decided to get himself some proper equipment.
Having acquired easel and colors, he describes his first timid steps in front of the canvas: “The palette gleamed with beads of color. Fair and white rose the canvas, the empty brush hung poised, heavy with destiny, irresolute in the air. My hand seemed arrested by a silent veto.” But noting that the sky was pale blue, he proceeded gingerly to load a “very small brush” with blue paint and, then, “with infinite precaution made a mark about as big as a bean on the affronted snow-white shield. It was a challenge, a deliberate challenge; but so subdued, so halting, indeed so cataleptic, that it deserved no response.”
At this point, the wife of his neighbor, the painter Sir John Lavery, arrives in his driveway in her car. She sees his hesitation, resolutely grabs a large brush and inflicts “several large fierce strokes and slashes of blue on the absolutely cowering canvass.” And lo,
From then on, painting was Churchill’s favorite hobby and escape valve, a means of warding off depression, especially during the long periods he was out of office. Rather than watercolors, for which England has a fine amateur tradition, oils were his chosen medium, as they are more forgiving. You can recoup your losses in oils, whereas in watercolors, one slip and you’ve had it. Oils are also more robust in nature and, therefore, more suitably Churchillian.
The key quality needed for a painter who starts out late in life is audacity, Churchill writes: There is no time for the usual childhood preliminaries, in the form of lessons and patient excercises; you have to jump right in. That means shortcuts are acceptable. Acknowledging his weakness as a draftsman, Churchill sometimes resorted to the aid of a Magic Lantern, with which he could project a slide onto his canvas.
As to his influences, he admired Sargent, Whistler, and the French impressionists, whose work is “instinct with gaiety, and floats in sparkling air.” He describes how, inspired by their example, he trained his eye, registering all the changing hues in a landscape, or in the tiny differences in the colors of the bricks in a wall.
Churchill’s own style–or styles, for he had several, depending on which of his painter friends were around–is characterized by his delight in color (“I rejoice with the brilliant ones and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns”) and the vigor of his brushstrokes. This very exuberance is also his weakness. According to his close friend, the French painter Paul Maze, who tried to discipline him, he was in love with the very pigment itself:
Characteristically, he saw painting in terms of fighting a battle, where the commander in chief, having surveyed the ground, enacts his battle plan. But sometimes the painting will “retaliate,” leaving the commander “besplattered,” and staring defeat in the eye.
Sir Martin Gilbert’s delightful In Search of Churchill describes such an occasion, in France in 1932, when painting a woodlands scene with Maze and four of his colleagues, Churchill lost control over his colors. But reinforcements being at hand, he armed each artist with a brush and issued directions as to what he wanted done, managing to turn disaster into triumph.
Afterwards, he had it signed by all the participants.
As demonstrated by the Sotheby’s sale, his pictures of Chartwell are especially prized because of Chartwell’s importance as his sanctuary. He had acquired Chartwell in 1922, and “I must go down to Chartwell and assault a canvass” is a typical remark, especially in his Wilderness Years. Favorite motifs were the black swans on the lake he himself had created, the garden wall he had built at a speed of 90 bricks an hour, and the still lifes, notably the one he fondly referred to as his “bottlescape.”
During World War II, Churchill produced only one painting. After the Casablanca conference, he brought Franklin Roosevelt out to Marrakech to admire the sunset over the Atlas Mountains. But again out of office, during 1945-51, he painted all over the world, often with Luce (and Life) footing the bill. The fierce light of North Africa and the brilliance of the Côte d’Azur had always captivated him. And from Italy, Gilbert includes the incident where he painted a house damaged by Allied bombs and was booed by the locals–afterwards admitting to a certain lack of tact. After all, he noted, he would himself have been “damned annoyed if Hitler had started to paint the bomb damage in London.”
Alas, the most delightful of all the anecdotes about Churchill the painter Gilbert dismisses as apocryphal. In retirement, the Labour prime minister Harold Wilson, working on a book about his predecessors, wrote to Gilbert that he had come across an example of what he termed Churchill’s “post-midnight activities.” At Checkers, the prime minister’s official country retreat, there is a huge canvas by Rubens, representing the lion from Aesop’s fable all tangled up in a net and saved by a mouse patiently nibbling through the rope.
“Can’t see the moushe,” Churchill growled one evening, with his characteristic lisp, ordered up a ladder, and scampered up with his palette to confer proper stature on the rodent.
“It takes a confident man and authoritative Prime Minister to decide to touch up a Rubens,” writes Wilson, adding that, regrettably, in a later cleaning of the painting, the old varnish had been removed–and with it, Churchill’s mouse. Gilbert doesn’t buy the story, claiming that Churchill was too much of an art lover to commit this kind of sacrilege.
Maybe so. But Lord Moran, Churchill’s physician, records another middle-of-the-night incident when, staying at an industrialist’s estate on Lake Como, Churchill decided that a picture of a sylvan landscape and lake needed a little extra zip. He got someone to wrench it loose from its socket in the wall, with plaster flying, and triumphantly abducted it to his bathroom/studio, where he added a glorious sunset and a host of highlights on the water.
Having second thoughts the next morning, he removed his additions with turpentine. But at least there are witnesses, on record, to this little adventure.
Henrik Bering is the author, most recently, of Helmut Kohl.
