Oblivion or Glory
Page 7
By now he was a serious amateur artist. Since first picking up his nephew’s paint brush at Hoe Farm he had made rapid progress. This was thanks both to his typical enthusiasm and energy for anything that fired his imagination, and to the help given to him by leading professional artists of the day. Two close neighbours when the Churchills were living on London’s Cromwell Road were John and Hazel Lavery, who became lifelong friends. The Belfast-born Sir John Lavery was one of Britain’s most accomplished portrait artists and Hazel, a striking American beauty some twenty years younger than her husband, was a fashion model who had posed for some of the leading photographers of the day. She had her own artistic talents and a ready gift for organizing soirées that brought together noted artists, politicians, and writers.
It was Hazel who took the first crucial step of unlocking Churchill’s artistic inhibitions. Finding him one day at Hoe Farm paralyzed by the blank space in front of him, she had simply seized a brush, filled it with paint, and splashed several large and fierce slashes of colour on the canvas. ‘Anyone could see that it could not hit back,’ he recalled later with his typical ironic humour. ‘No evil fate avenged the jaunty violence. The canvas grinned in helplessness before me. The spell was broken. The sickly inhibitions rolled away . . . I have never felt awe of a canvas since.’
From then on he never lost an opportunity to paint, whether in Lavery’s London studio, on the battlefront at Ploegsteert, staying the weekend with friends in the English countryside, with his family amidst the delights of Lullenden, or at Freddie and Amy Guest’s house at Roehampton. His mother once found him painting at Blenheim. ‘His last paintings are very good,’ she enthused to her sister Leonie. ‘Lavery says that if Winston could take up painting as a profession he could, but of course he uses it as an opiate.’5 During the previous spring he had spent several days at the Duke of Westminster’s vast estate at Mimizan south of Bordeaux, struggling to capture on canvas the dark and serried ranks of pine trees that dominate this stretch of the Atlantic coastline. ‘How I wish Lavery were here to give me a few hints,’ he lamented to Clementine; ‘it would bring me on like one o’clock . . .’ The Irish artist held a high regard for his efforts, recording that he knew of few amateur painters with a ‘keener sense of light and colour, or a surer grasp of essentials’, and that had he chosen painting instead of statesmanship he would have been ‘a great master with the brush’.6
Clementine, too, gave him great support. His new interest in art was as sudden as it was unexpected. Until he was forty, he had never visited an art gallery. So the two of them went off to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. The first picture they came to Clementine thought was ‘very ordinary’. Nonetheless, Winston spent half an hour studying it minutely. The next day they were back again, although this time Clementine insisted they use a different entrance to ensure he did not return to the same picture.7
So it was with a significant body of work behind him that he visited the Galerie Druet. It was his first commercial exhibition and six of the paintings were sold. Unfortunately, history does not record which, nor for how much. But as his youngest daughter Mary was to write many years later, it must have given her father much pleasure to know from his first public showing that his paintings had a market.8
Mostly landscapes, Churchill’s paintings are traditional, safe, and reassuring, giving no hint of the incendiary and provocative trends that were then shaking the foundations of European art and culture. The post-First World War Paris that welcomed his first exhibition was also a city echoing with the revolutionary and discordant tones of American jazz and the provocative nihilism of its artistic twin, Dadaism, as represented by poets and artists such as Tristan Tzara, André Breton, and Francis Picabia. All were a repudiation of the post-war cries for a ‘return to order’. Yet the restoration of order was precisely what Churchill craved, as he had so fervently told Lloyd George almost exactly a year before in the same city, where the peacemakers were still wrangling over the future. Conservatism in art was his mantra, and remained so. Three decades later, at the prompting of President Eisenhower, he agreed to a travelling exhibition of his paintings in America. When it opened in Kansas City it was visited by former President Harry Truman, who pronounced ‘Damned Good. At least you can tell what they are and that is more than you can say for a lot of the modern painters.’ Churchill beamed.9
This did not mean that he was averse to learning new tricks. After their visit to the Galerie Druet, Montag took him to some other galleries in Paris and for the first time he got to see in person paintings by some of the leading French Impressionists. But it was only when he reached the remarkable sunlight of the Riviera that he was fully able to absorb and admire their techniques.10
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If he hoped that the name of Charles Morin would throw people off the scent about the real name of the artist on display at the Galerie Druet, he was mistaken. By now the fact that painting had become his consuming passion was a widespread topic of newspaper gossip in Britain, and 1921 was to see the easel and other artistic paraphernalia added to the miscellany of eccentric and undersized hats as one of the standard Churchill props delighted in by cartoonists. It was also the year that saw him write an article that would firmly anchor his reputation as a gifted amateur artist. This was ‘Painting as a Pastime’, which was to appear in the Strand magazine as a two-part article over the winter. Illustrated with nineteen of his paintings, mostly in colour, the journal also featured distinguished writers such as P. G. Wodehouse and Arthur Conan Doyle. Churchill would later publish these reflections on painting as a small book after the Second World War. It proved to be one of his most popular and successful; expanded and revised it has been more or less constantly in print ever since. Even as he left for Paris, he was mapping it out in his head.
His artistic endeavours offered hostile observers ready weapons for ridicule. The Daily Herald was one of his most savage critics. The newspaper of the Labour Party was bitterly hostile to his attacks on the party and his belligerence towards Russia. Over the previous year it had been engaged in a bitter vendetta with him over funding it had received from Moscow and for disciplinary action taken by the War Office against those soldiers opposing intervention on behalf of the White forces in the Russian Civil War. Churchill in turn denounced the paper for encouraging ‘mutinies, strikes, and riots’. In retaliation, the Herald published a bitterly satirical poem by the author Osbert Sitwell that savaged Churchill’s support for Admiral Kolchak, denounced him for wasting ‘a million lives’ at Gallipoli, and painted him as a bloodthirsty warmonger for whom wars were ‘nothing more than a form of sport like football or kiss-in-the mouth’.11
News about the French exhibition of his paintings had leaked to the Herald and three days before he left London its Paris correspondent went to town with the news. In an article headlined ‘Winston, the Painter’ he referred to four pictures entitled ‘Southern Scenes’ being exhibited in a ‘well-known picture gallery on the Rue Royale’. ‘Broad, audacious, and highly coloured,’ he wrote, they had been favourably reviewed by local art critics who were apparently unaware of the true identity of Charles Morin. They all agreed, he claimed tongue-in-cheek, that the artist should continue painting and leave whatever other work he was engaged on to devote himself entirely to art. Not surprisingly, the Herald threw its weight behind the critics’ advice – probably concocted by itself – to keep off other, meaning political, activities.12 Whether or not Churchill was aware of this leak is unclear. In any event, after two days in Paris he and Clementine boarded the night sleeper train bound for the south of France.
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The Riviera had long been a magnet for Britain’s upper classes migrating swallow-like from the cold grey damp of their north Atlantic winters. Dozens of once small and impoverished fishing villages and ports had been transformed into sunny winter resorts, and after the arrival of the railway in the 1860s grand and luxurious hotels catering for the rich had sprouted up in places such as Cannes, Nice, an
d Menton. The casino in Monte Carlo opened in 1866, followed by its grand opera house thirteen years later. European royalty increasingly wintered on the Riviera, and in the last two decades of her life Queen Victoria stayed there on nine separate occasions. She made her last visit in 1899 by which time she had settled on Nice as her favourite destination – or, to be more precise, Cimiez, an ancient Roman settlement 400 feet above the coastal city and linked to it by electric tram. With its boulevards lined with plane trees and magnificent vistas of the valleys below and the mountains above, it was an exclusive and idyllic spot featuring two luxurious hotels, the Grand and the Excelsior Regina. The latter, a ‘shining colossus of marble and stucco’, was Victoria’s favourite.
This was now also the Churchills’ destination. At the railway station in Nice they were welcomed officially by the British consul and the local French prefect and then driven to their hotel. Here the host for their stay was one of the richest men in Britain, Sir Ernest Cassel.
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Churchill’s connection with Cassel went back many years. The son of a Jewish banker in Cologne, Cassel had accumulated his vast fortune through shrewd investments around the globe in railways, mining, and government loans. But he was best known in Britain as the personal banker and closest male friend to King Edward VII. He also physically resembled the monarch with his portly figure, heavy beard, and penchant for double-breasted suits – so much so, indeed, that the two were sometimes mocked as ‘the Windsor-Cassels’. He had lived in Britain for fifty years, was a naturalized citizen, a Privy Counsellor, a noted philanthropist, and a convert to Catholicism – although this provided little protection against the insidious anti-Semitism that infected much of the British upper-class society with which Churchill mingled.
The link with Churchill was a family one. Cassel was a close friend of Lord Randolph and was generous to both his sons. He found a job in banking for Jack, and holidays for Winston had become something of a tradition. An early one included a trip down the Nile on Cassel’s yacht in 1902 to witness the opening of the Aswan Dam, for which he had arranged the finances. At least two summer holidays were spent at his sumptuous villa in the Swiss Alps, where Churchill enjoyed long walks while working on his father’s biography. Brook House on Park Lane in Mayfair, Cassel’s principal residence, sported six marble-lined kitchens and an oak-panelled dining room that could seat a hundred guests. Churchill also benefited handsomely from Cassel’s investments of the money he made from his early literary efforts and speaking tours. When Winston married Clementine in 1908 Cassel gave him £500, which was then a really generous wedding gift.
But Cassel’s gilded life was also marked by tragedy. His English wife died only three years after their marriage and his only child, a daughter, succumbed in her early thirties to tuberculosis. Since then he had lavished his affections on his two grandchildren, especially the elder, Edwina. Named in honour of her godfather, King Edward VII, she was now a vibrant and glamorous twenty-year-old living in Brook House and acting as Cassel’s social hostess. It was no surprise, therefore, that she was present in Nice to help host the Churchills and his other guests. The following year, in one of the most glamorous weddings of the season, she married Lord Louis Mountbatten, then a young naval lieutenant. Two decades later, under Churchill’s wartime leadership, Mountbatten would be appointed the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in South-East Asia before becoming the last Viceroy of India, tasked with the granting of independence to India. Thirty years after that, he was to be assassinated in Ireland by IRA terrorists.13
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The Riviera played such an integral part in the social calendar of British society during this era that The Times included a separate section of its ‘Court and Society’ column devoted entirely to its affairs. This was the year that saw visitors at last returning on the scale of the years before the war. The exodus to the sun saw London hotels deserted while berths in sleeping cars to the Riviera were fully booked up for a month ahead. Monte Carlo – ‘the Mecca of the Mediterranean’ – was once again a magnet for visitors. Now, thanks to a new and efficient bus service linking its glittering white casino to the other great resorts along the coast, visitors at last had an alternative to the slow, dirty, and uncomfortable journey by rail. No longer would first-class passengers have to wait around in draughty stations for trains that rarely arrived on time.
Now, of course, for more comfortable personal transport there was also the motor car and the chauffeur, an increasingly common sight along the Corniche as the rich and famous returned to bask in the warmth under endless blue skies. The only downside was their magnetic draw for pickpockets and thieves. Cimiez itself was the scene of one of the largest robberies of the 1921 season when £20,000 worth of jewellery and cash was stolen from a bedroom at one of its largest hotels while the occupants, a Paris-based diplomat and his wife, were asleep. The mystery of why they did not wake up during the burglary was subsequently solved by the discovery of a strange device described as an ‘asphyxiating gas revolver’ that emitted fumes ensuring the victims remained asleep.14
Germans, as well as Russian aristocrats, had been part of the Riviera scene before the war. Now, in their absence, it was more than ever a British enclave. Indeed, it could well have been renamed Mayfair-sur-Mer. It was not just that the Churchills were staying with their Mayfair neighbour Cassel. They were also rubbing shoulders with friends such as the Duke and Duchess of Westminster, the Duke of Marlborough, and the press magnates Lords Beaverbrook and Northcliffe. There were fine restaurants for dining such as Ciro’s, and plenty to do. Most Riviera resorts sported golf courses, polo grounds, and tennis courts, and new ones were appearing all the time.
For the athletically inclined Clementine, tennis was a passion. So it was a treat when she and Cassel motored over to Monte Carlo at the end of January to join the cream of British society wintering in the south for the official opening of new lawn tennis courts in Monte Carlo. Not only did she love playing the game herself. This year she could also watch the first female tennis celebrity in person. The flamboyant twenty-one-year-old French player Suzanne Lenglen had won Wimbledon for the previous two years, was ranked amongst the top ten players in the world, and dominated this year’s Riviera tournament. One of Clementine’s most exciting moments came when she herself won a few games in a doubles match against opponents who included a pre-war Wimbledon champion while being cheered on by a sympathetic crowd that included Lenglen. ‘Dizzy with glory’ was how she felt.15
Churchill had his own new special passion to pursue and preferred to give tennis and golf a miss. He happily dined at Ciro’s with Beaverbrook, took lunch with the local French prefect, and hobnobbed with Northcliffe. The mornings he devoted to business. Telegrams followed him from London that demanded action, and throughout his Riviera stay he remained on top of War Office business. But every afternoon he got into a car and motored a little way out of Nice, chose a picturesque spot, and got to work on a canvas. It was a routine he was to follow over the many decades to come on his visits to the south of France.
The press followed his new pastime with interest. When he left towards the end of the month The Times reported that ‘He has put in some good work with his paint brush during his short sojourn, and is thus taking back to England several souvenirs of the many beauty spots which abound close to hand.’ But it was more than additional canvases that Churchill took home. He returned from the Riviera having learned a different way of seeing.16
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In 1885 Hugh Macmillan, a minister in the Presbyterian Free Church of Scotland and a devout believer in the moral and spiritual truths to be revealed by nature, published a richly illustrated book based on his personal travels entitled The Riviera. His introduction was a rhapsody to the region’s scenic beauty and grandeur that highlighted the ‘peculiar quality of the light that shines on sea and shore’. It was a land, he went on, ‘where the brilliant sunshine and translucent atmosphere gives the feeling of vast aerial space [and where] the light has
a sparkling crystalline lustre, as if each particle of air through which it passes was the facet of a gem. It transfigures every object, makes a dead leaf to shine like a ruby, and converts the meanest and most squalid scene into a picture.’17
By the time Churchill arrived at Cimiez many French painters had long since discovered the same magical and transformative quality of light in the south of France. Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne were trailblazers, soon to be followed by other Impressionists and Post-Impressionists such as Paul Signac, Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, André Derain, Raoul Dufy, Pierre Bonnard, and Claude Monet. In the spring of 1921 those still living were joined by Henri Matisse, who moved permanently to a two-roomed apartment in the old city of Nice, a mere stone’s throw away from the sea.18
The presence of these masters attracted a host of other lesser artists seduced by the unique light of the Mediterranean. During a brief visit to the small Provençal fishing village of Cassis the previous autumn, Churchill had closely studied their technique. It was a revelation. He realized that they viewed nature less as a matter of form and surface than as ‘a mass of shimmering light . . . which gleams with beautiful harmonies and contrasts of colours’. Until then, he had painted the sea with long, smooth, horizontal strokes of mixed pigment. Now he saw that it could be done in an entirely different way, through innumerable small points of colour, sometimes even vertical rather than horizontal daubs, each of which emitted a vibration peculiar to itself and so created canvases that were brilliant and alive, quite unlike those of previous centuries. He was smitten. ‘Have not Manet and Monet, Cezanne and Matisse rendered to painting something of the same service which Keats and Shelley gave to poetry after the ceremonious literary perfections of the eighteenth century?’ he asked. ‘The beauty of their work is instinct with gaiety, and floats in sparkling air.’19