Winston Churchill’s world in paintings

You are drawn to a major art exhibition of a well-known painter. Perhaps a Rembrandt, Vermeer, Turner, Constable or Monet. Whoever. Invariably one of the canvases has spoken to you. You know the drill. You stalk the halls admiring the development of the artist’s oeuvre, and pause before the object of your pilgrimage. Then you buy the catalogue to learn more of the creator’s life and influences on his style.

The other day I visited a new exhibition in London where this process was curiously reversed. Arriving with a full knowledge of the subject’s life, the realisation hit me almost immediately that few present had any knowledge of the artist’s hundreds of images. Indeed, chatting to others at the launch, all agreed there was not one well-known study that summed up the man and his art.

It is an inspired move for the Wallace Collection to mount the first comprehensive exhibition of Winston Churchill’s paintings anywhere since his death in 1965. With the help of his friend President Eisenhower, a selection of his canvases toured museums in North America in 1958, seen by 650,000 people, and was also shown at the Royal Academy in early 1959, when Hallmark sold greetings cards bearing reproductions of his works. Sotheby’s in London displayed more in early 1998, visited by 12,000 people in two weeks, but the Wallace’s current assemblage of works marks the first step forward in reassessing the importance of Churchill’s art in over 60 years.

The venue, less well known than it should be, is a haven of fine furniture, arms and armour, porcelain and old masters, nestling in the former aristocratic townhouse of the Marquesses of Hertford, in London’s West End. Many of the works displayed can be viewed in the crowded painter’s studio at Churchill’s home, the National Trust-run Chartwell. Its curator, Katherine Carter, writes in the accompanying exhibition catalogue of Churchill’s love of both his Kentish estate and of painting, and belief that ‘a day away from Chartwell is a day wasted’. Instead of simply transporting the Chartwell collection to London, the assembled artworks have been drawn from around the world. Indeed, as the historian Andrew Roberts observes in his essay for the exhibition guidebook, Churchill rarely sold any of his paintings, instead gifting at least 73 of his known canvases to friends and contemporaries, as well as to members of his immediate family. Some went to generals, statesmen and presidents as a unique expression of Churchillian ‘soft power’.

On my way past the paintings, I met Philip Mould, the art critic and co-presenter of the BBC’s investigative art history programme, Fake or Fortune? He was peering intently at Churchill’s brushstrokes. He turned to answer my question, ‘Were there any Churchill fakes around?’ ‘Yes, they are beginning to appear’, was his unambiguous reply. ‘Churchill scholarship is hampered by the fact that we don’t know how many artworks he completed, or even the location of some of the subject matter. There is only an incomplete catalogue raisonné [authoritatively researched list of artworks, published in 1967], listing around five hundred art works, with possibly another two hundred in private hands yet to be found and identified.’

Mould’s observations were underlined by the fact that two of the paintings present had sold for prices stretching into the millions. The Goldfish Pool at Chartwell (1932) achieved £1.7 million in 2014, whilst, more recently, Angelina Jolie offloaded The Tower of the Koutoubia Mosque (painted at Marrakesh in 1943) for £8.2 million in 2021.

‘But are they any good?’ I hear you say, which is the question I asked Xavier Bray, director of the Wallace Collection. Bray presents this display as ‘the closest we’ll get to an apotheosis of Churchill as painter’, which he boasts is ‘an autobiography through visual means.’ And he is right.

Indeed, there is far more to the display than the Churchill name alone. Often modest about his art (calling his paintings ‘daubs’), the artist often submitted his works anonymously to galleries in Paris and London under the pseudonyms Charles Morin and David Winter. The expertly curated Wallace exhibition incorporates an unnamed 1925 canvas depicting Chartwell under a heavy blanket of snow, which won a competition for amateurs, despite one judge wanting to exclude the work ‘as it was clearly the work of a professional’. Two more by David Winter were accepted for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1947 (others in 1953 and 1955), which made him an ‘Honorary Academician Extraordinary’. Andrew Roberts reports Pablo Picasso as saying that ‘If Churchill were a painter by profession, he’d have no trouble making a living.’

Churchill was passionate enough about his hobby to write a delightful essay in 1921, Painting as a Pastime, later expanded into a slim volume. In later life, he admitted: ‘If it weren’t for painting, I could not live. I couldn’t bear the strain of things.’ Although Churchill used painting to take him away from the stresses of public office and war, the Wallace exhibition is therefore an important exercise in peering deep into Churchill’s soul.

In his tome on painting, he was as eloquent on paper as he was on canvas, likening the creation of art to his accumulation of printed works. He wrote:

What shall I do with all my books? – Read them, or if you cannot read them, at any rate handle them, fondle them. Peer into them. Let them fall open where they will. Read on from the first sentence that arrests the eye. Then turn to another. Make a voyage of discovery, taking soundings of uncharted seas. Set them back on their shelves with your own hands. Arrange them on your own plan, so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. If they cannot be your friends, let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.

For Churchill, assembling a library was also a visual affair, and a mere heartbeat away from the magic of a gallery of canvases bearing colour. This appreciation ran deep in his blood, from the moment of his birth at Blenheim Palace, ancestral seat of his forebears the Dukes of Marlborough, with its acres of fine tapestries, paintings and leather-bound volumes. Understanding that his own writing style involved reproducing brilliant word pictures and bon mots, he joined the dots to tubes of colour and brushwork, musing: ‘The painter wanders and loiters contentedly from place to place, always on the lookout for some brilliant butterfly of a picture which can be caught and set up and carried safely home.’

Small wonder then, that Churchill the painter brought the same rigour of creativity, hard work and learning to his compositions as he did to his written works. The arrangement of his art is in the form of a narrative life story in paint. We are first introduced to his earliest canvases, of the Western Front at Ploegsteert in Belgium, made by Lieutenant Colonel Churchill of the 6th Royal Scots Fusiliers in 1916. His frustration is on record at his inability to portray the correct depth of shell craters, or that pond water rendered in later compositions appeared too shallow.

A few months earlier, his brother Jack’s wife, Lady Gwendeline, known to all as ‘Goonie’, had encouraged Churchill to paint at Hoe Farm, a 16th-century mansion near Godalming in Surrey on which Lutyens had once dabbled. The two Churchill brothers had jointly leased the mansion when Winston had left the government under the cloud of Gallipoli in the summer of 1915. Goonie was an enthusiastic amateur who saw her frustrated brother-in-law in need of a stress-busting hobby. More expert help arrived from Hazel, wife of the society portraitist John Lavery, of whose intervention Churchill wrote in his 1921 essay. When intimidated by the virgin canvas, his hand seemingly ‘arrested by silent veto’, Lady Lavery took over and liberally plastered the offending linen in vivid blue. Churchill vouchsafed that his ‘sickly inhibitions rolled away’, grabbed the nearest brush and attacked the canvas ‘with berserk fury’. He soon determined, like the words in his many books and speeches, ‘the colours are lovely to look at, and delicious to squeeze out’.

The influence of both Laverys, and artists Walter Sickert and William Nicholson, are immediately apparent in the following rooms of paintings, where the amateur Churchill is experimenting with composition, light and shade and tones, including a stunning self-portrait, in a series of canvases that demonstrate serious application and a growing confidence. There are a few still-lifes, including an arresting one of wine bottles, decanters, glasses and cigar boxes entitled Bottlescape (painted in 1926), which seems to sum up the man perfectly. The last, now empty, quarter-bottle of Pol Roger he drank just before his death is an early exhibit, and as much a coda to his life as painting.

Winston was less confident with human figures, as is the lot of many amateurs, so compromised mostly by consigning them into the distance. One of his larger canvases (most are small), also adorning the cover of the exhibition catalogue, depicts tiny figures watching the sea from a rock in Cap d’Ail, Alpes-Maritimes, from La Capponcina, executed in 1952, but they are dwarfed by the trees, sea and cliffs around them.

Lucy Davis, the Wallace’s expert Curator of Paintings, guided us to a seaside scene, On The Beach at Walmer, which portrays a family group, into which the artist has inserted himself, frolicking in the distant waves. Davis related how this work introduces us to the artist’s modus operandi, for alongside the painting is the glass slide Churchill took of the beach with its bathers, and the projector he used to throw the enlarged image onto his canvas to help when sketching the initial composition. We are arrested by the lurking bulk of a huge Napoleonic cannon in the foreground, pointing out to sea and distant France. Painted in 1938, it completely dominates the entire right of the same picture, and is surely a political reference to Churchill’s view of appeasement and of the maelstrom he believed was about to descend on Europe.

Winston was at his most confident with buildings and gardens, and the bulk of the display portrays the many country houses in which Churchill had luxuriated. Apart from Chartwell, we see, among others, Blenheim, Cranborne Manor, Knebworth, the Palladian bridge at Wilton House, and Ightham Mote in Kent. Further afield we are treated to several arresting compositions of the Château Saint-Georges-Motel, a Marlborough family home near Dreux. With his glimpses of man-made structures, often framed by trees, or seen in watery reflections, Churchill is at his most original. He never provides a mere illustration of his subject, but, as good artists do, communicates a mood. At his best, his free rein impressionism sends messages of sun-dappled tranquillity. Even the Bottlescape still life of 1926 captures a post-prandial moment of bonhomie from half-drunk glasses of brandy and empty bottles of wine.

Churchill’s time in political office afforded much opportunity for travel and the chance to haul easel and brushes around the world. A memorable view of Jerusalem was the product of the then-Colonial Secretary having just redrawn the map of the Middle East at the 1921 Cairo Conference. Out of office, particularly in his decade-long ‘Wilderness Years’ of 1929-39, he ranged the globe, alighting particularly on the restorative vistas of the French Riviera and Morocco. In vibrant colours, suggesting wind and water, harmony, shade and history, both regions appropriately dominate the later stages of the Wallace display. In many cases, his correspondence reveals that painting was his reason to travel, which converted him into an ardent Francophile and Moroccophile. He once wrote that ‘Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy, an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then a master and then a tyrant.’ But he might have observed the same of his painting, for which he was a willing and hard-working slave.

The subject of the final room is Churchill’s love affair with Morocco, which he visited six times between 1935 and 1959. Here I encountered the author Clare Mulley, who specialises in biographies of notable women in the Second World War. I found her drawn to, and feasting her eyes upon, Churchill’s large travelling easel, displayed in a glass case. It is splattered with daubs of Winston’s paint, betraying his experimentation with colours, whilst the reverse still bears his luggage label. This was the nuclear reactor of the whole exhibition, the core machine responsible for everything. An almost electrical charge affected those standing nearby.

We both agreed the star of the show hung opposite: The Tower of the Koutoubia Mosque. As a painting it is perfectly proportioned. In the centre lie the walls of Marrakech, their depth emphasised by left-sloping diagonal shadows, cast by the setting sun. The foreground is busy with Winston’s signature tiny figures entering and leaving the main gate, while the background is framed by the Atlas Mountains, whose snowy peaks (where the light changes by the minute) reflect the Moroccan glare. The tower of the mosque looms over the city; it is the hour when the muezzin is calling the faithful to prayer. Consisting mainly of whites, pinks and ochres, the image is a happy, confident one, conveying warmth with a sense of travel and exotic adventure. This portrait of Marrakech sums up its maker.

Expertly painted in a single day, 25 January 1943, the canvas speaks of antiquity and ritual, of far-off lands, emphasised by palm trees in the middle distance. Although he completed possibly 700 pictures, this was the only one made by Churchill during the entire Second World War. In fact, the composition illustrates a refuge: a rare moment when we glimpse the war leader free from stress. It was also one of his best, and in 1948 he gifted it to President Truman with a note: ‘This picture… is about as presentable as anything I can produce. It shows the beautiful panorama of the snow-capped Atlas Mountains in Marrakech. This is the view I persuaded your predecessor [Roosevelt] to see before he left North Africa after the Casablanca Conference.’

One came away from the Wallace’s Winston Churchill: The Painter with a strong sense of the artist’s curiosity, his need to see and feel as much of our world as he could. The exhibition communicates real industry and graft, wonderful experimentation with colour and tone, the desire of the man to understand the fundamentals of painting and improve his own. In short, this is not an exhibition exploiting the Churchill name to display a few mediocre canvases. True, some are loose and primitive, almost slapdash, but the intention is also to demonstrate the journey of Churchill the painter.

At the same time, we must remember Winston the writer, Churchill the connoisseur, warlord and wit, the bricklayer who built the garden walls and his painting pavilion at Chartwell, the animal breeder, aviator, beekeeper, bon viveur, broadcaster, horseman, journalist, lepidopterist, newspaper editor, orator, orchid-collector, and polo-player, who was also improving his style in innumerable other fields, learning all the while. One is left with the impression of great potential. Winston was that rare beast – an artist who didn’t need to sell his paintings – who, had he been freed from the distractions of political office and developed his skills even more, might have ranked with the greatest names in English Impressionism.

You have until 29 November to visit Winston Churchill: The Painter at the Wallace Collection. It is an experience I thoroughly recommend.