Winston Churchill: An Informal Study of Greatness

by Taylor, Robert Lewis

  Churchill began the custom of taking his easel and other artists’ materials along wherever he went. He visited Egypt and had the misfortune to suffer a nasty fall from a camel while attempting to paint the Pyramids. He had been warned that the project was risky — a camel’s work habits are known as bohemian — but he insisted that there was no finer movable studio in existence. The precise cause of the upheaval was open to surmise, but the camel suddenly faced Mecca and saluted the Christian world with its rear heels. Churchill, thrown heavily to the sand, was badly smeared with the paint that he’d intended for a pyramid. He clambered up without reportable comment and for once did not press for a return engagement. The incident is cherished in artistic circles, being the only near-serious professional fall from a camel ever recorded by an artist of renown.

  Curiously for him, Churchill has always been shy about showing his pictures. He has sent them to exhibits under various pseudonyms but has not, in recent years, made any attempt to sell them. Most of his best products are hung in a specially adapted cottage on the grounds at Chartwell. If some guest evinces a genuine interest, the master will take him on a conducted tour of the gallery. In 1947, for the first time, Churchill submitted a few of his works to the Royal Academy, using the name “Mr. Winter.” Two were selected for hanging. By the next year, however, his fame had so far progressed that the Academy elected him Honorary Academician Extraordinary; the Society of British Artists, too, made him an honorary member. And in 1949, six of his pictures were shown at the Royal Academy’s exhibition.

  Paul Maze has said of Churchill, “He paints joyfully — alas, he has taken hints from others and lost some of his spontaneity.” An influence of Cézanne has been found in his landscapes, and his figures, conspicuously weak in his repertory, are impressionistic. He is a bold colorist, a reflection of his character, which is one of bright and positive hues rather than shadowy grays and melancholy browns. Picasso, whose political background would not necessarily tend to make him generous toward Churchill, once said, “If that man were a painter by profession he’d have no trouble in earning a good living.” A lot of fine English and French artists have added personally to Churchill’s tutelage and complimented his work. At one time or another, Walter Sickert and Sir William Nicholson helped him, the latter functioning for a while as a kind of unofficial painting master to the Prime Minister, as music masters were appointed to the children of nobility. Of Churchill’s landscapes, Eric Newton has commented that “They are by no means inconsiderable. They would have been worth looking at had the name they bore been far less illustrious.” And perhaps the best index to the commercial value of the statesman’s art is provided by the director of London’s most famous gallery, who says, “Were they by an unknown they would be worth 150 guineas [$450] each. Signed by Churchill — any sum he chose to ask, and for as many pictures as he had to sell.”

  Churchill reluctantly allowed one of his larger paintings to be auctioned off at a recent Y.W.C.A. benefit. A rich Brazilian admirer, Senhor Chateaubriand, known in South American circles as “the newspaper king,” came to the function prepared to acquire the item for as high as thirteen thousand pounds. What was his surprise, and embarrassment, when the bidding began to expire in the vicinity of a thousand pounds and he finally got the prize for the peculiar sum of £1310.10s. The game but pauperized British present had already expended their carefully saved capital for fat-free foods and taxes for multiplying government bureaus. Though not inclined to sell the actual pictures, Churchill has been lenient in the matter of certain reproduction rights. In his realistic way, he struck a neat bargain with Joyce C. Hall, the American greeting-card magnate. Hall bought the greeting rights to sixteen of the statesman’s oils and told the press, “He is a wonderful artist whom few people in America know. He is too modest about his paintings. Our cards will insure that he gets the notice he deserves.” He quoted Churchill as favoring the plunge “in order to encourage amateur painters.” While the price for this artistic wedding was not advertised, it was said to be substantial. The Soho Galleries in London have the British right to publish Christmas card reproductions of his pictures. In three years, says the management, the sales have run to six figures (in pounds). The fact that Churchill is backward about selling his work does not mean that he holds it cheaply. When Life magazine imported eighteen of his paintings to be reproduced in color, he had them insured for three hundred thousand dollars.

  John Rothenstein, the director of London’s Tate Gallery, has described his impressions of Churchill at work, by means of an article in the Sunday Times, beginning with Delacroix’s observation after calling on Corot: “To know a painter you must see him in his studio.” Rothenstein found Churchill (at Chartwell) wearing a siren suit, a very wide-brimmed “painting hat,” and a pair of black slippers with his initials worked on them in gold. Before getting the session under way, the artist gave his guest a bottle of champagne and some lunch, and then sang him a music hall ballad he’d learned from Walter Sickert. Offered a cigar, Rothenstein refused, with the rather sententious remark that “Every man should have one virtue” — his was not smoking. Churchill instantly picked this up, saying, “There is no such thing as a negative virtue. If I have been of any service to my fellow men, it has never been by self-repression, but always by self-expression.”

  In the studio, Churchill begged his visitor to “Speak, I pray, with absolute frankness.” Warmed by champagne, Rothenstein fired off a few small guns at one of the landscapes. He stuck pretty close to the special parlance of career appraisal and said, in effect, that the shore was too pale and lightly modeled to support the weight of the heavy trees, with their dense, dark foliage. “Instead of growing up out of the earth, they weigh it down,” he added. “Oh, but I can put that right at once,” cried Churchill, springing toward his easel. “It will take less than a quarter of an hour.”

  Rothenstein was horrified.

  “But this painting must certainly be among your earliest?”

  “I did it about twenty years ago,” replied Churchill, lighting a fresh cigar.

  “Well, then,” said Rothenstein with finality, “surely it’s impossible for you to recapture the mood in which you painted it, or indeed your whole outlook of those days.”

  Grumbling, Churchill gave the idea up. It was plain that he felt he could recapture the mood with ease, or even the whole outlook, but he capitulated to criticism.

  “Mr. Churchill,” Rothenstein wrote, “has set himself to cultivate the restricted possibilities open to him with the utmost assiduity and discernment. He is, therefore, able to do much more than enjoy himself in the sunlight. By the skilful choice of subjects within his range but to which he can respond ardently, he is able to paint pictures of real merit which bear a direct and intimate relation to his outlook on life.

  “In these pictures there comes bubbling irrepressibly up his sheer enjoyment of the simple beauties of nature — water, whether still or ruffled by wind; snow, immaculate and crisp; trees, dark with the density of their foliage or dappled with sunlight; fresh flowers and distant mountains; and, above all, sunlight at its most intense.

  “The highest peaks of his achievement are, in my opinion, ‘The Goldfish Pool at Chartwell’ (1948), ‘The Loup River, Quebec’ (1947 ), ‘Chartwell under Snow’ (1947), and ‘Cannes Harbour, Evening’ (1923). These express with insight and candour his vivid and voracious enjoyment of living.”

  Churchill wrote a little book entitled Painting as a Pastime in 1948 and illustrated it with good color reproductions of his favorite canvases. The text throws some intense sunlight on his attitude toward art as practiced by himself. Clearly enough, he still sees his painting as relaxation rather than a serious expression of his creative force. “Change is the master key,” he says. “A man can wear out a particular part of his mind by continually using it and tiring it, just in the same way as he can wear out the elbows of his coat.” At a time when he was past forty, Churchill suddenly realized that he was wearing out the el
bows of his mind and decided that “The cultivation of a hobby and new forms of interest is therefore a policy of first importance to a public man.”

  His account of his actual start differs somewhat from that once given by Sir John Lavery, and must therefore be presented: “Some experiments one Sunday in the country with the children’s paint-box led me to procure the next morning a complete outfit for painting in oils.

  “Having bought the colours, an easel, and a canvas, the next step was to begin. But what a step to take! The palette gleamed with beads of colour; 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 after all the sky on this occasion was unquestionably blue, and a pale blue at that. There could be no doubt that blue paint mixed with white should be put on the top part of the canvas. One really does not need to have had an artist’s training to see that. It is a starting-point open to all. So very gingerly I mixed a little blue paint on the palette with a very small brush, and then with infinite precaution made a mark about as big as a bean upon 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 that moment the loud approaching sound of a motor-car was heard in the drive. From this chariot there stepped swiftly and lightly none other than the gifted wife of Sir John Lavery. ‘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.”

  Sooner or later in his book, it was to be expected that Churchill would see art from a military viewpoint. The blood of Marlborough runs strong in his veins, and the gay times in India and the Sudan did nothing to curb a natural enthusiasm. Several other well-known persons have the same tendency. Ernest Hemingway, as he walks through life, with his flanks protected, appraises each shifting scene in terms of a passage at arms. “In all battles,” writes Churchill, “two things are usually required of the Commander-in-Chief: to make a good plan for his army and, secondly, to keep a strong reserve. Both these are also obligatory upon the painter.” Artistic reserves, to Churchill, signify a landscape well stocked with vivid objects. “I must say I like bright colours,” he says. “I agree with Ruskin in his denunciation of that school of painting who eat ‘slate-pencil and chalk, and assure everybody that they are nicer and purer than strawberries and plums.’ I cannot pretend to feel impartial about the colours. I rejoice with the brilliant ones, and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns. When I get to heaven I mean to spend a considerable portion of my first million years in painting, and so get to the bottom of the subject. But then I shall require a still gayer palette than I get here below. I expect orange and Vermillion will be the darkest, dullest colours upon it, and beyond them there will be a whole range of wonderful new colours which will delight the celestial eye.”

  Here below, Churchill’s selection of places in which to paint reflects his love of color. The titles of his pictures tell the overall story of his artistic travels. There are: “St. Jean, Cap Ferrat,” this spot a long finger of land thrust out into the Mediterranean between Villefranche and Monte Carlo; “By Lake Lugane,” a cobalt body of ice water in the Swiss Alps; “The Mediterranean Near Genoa,” “The Mill, Saint-Georges-Motel, Normandy,” “Near Antibes” on the Riviera, “Desert Scene” at Marrakech in North Africa, “Village Near Lugano,” also in Switzerland, and, using perhaps the brightest of England’s color impressions, “The Weald of Kent under Snow.”

  Churchill has impressed people with the lordly and precise bustle which it takes to get him set up for work. His costume is extravagant, with a broad, limp hat, a white, shoe-length smock that looks like an Arabian burnous, a dead cigar in his mouth, spectacles perched far down on his nose, a whacking large easel on oversize stilts, and, frequently, a bucket of frosted champagne at his feet. In a hot place, he instructs a servant to set up an umbrella on a long pole, or, if the sod is rocky, to stand by his side and hold it. On several occasions in troubled periods, Inspector Thompson has been numbered among the unvivid objects in the immediate landscape — revolver at the ready, alerted for assassins or hysterical art critics. Hundreds of strollers have come upon Churchill thus accoutered, and have gone away happy and refreshed.

  The statesman’s general appearance has also proved of interest to other artists. In 1948 the United States Artists’ League found his face “among the ten most provocative in the world,” and a great many fine painters and sculptors have essayed to immortalize it. Walter Sickert once did a head and shoulders (working, for some reason, from a photograph) which gave the subject such a pugnacious look that Mrs. Churchill objected. Churchill likes it. In newsreels he has a horror of looking soft or effeminate and insists that no make-up shall be applied. It is difficult to pose him. His cousin, Clare Sheridan, a sculptress, modeled his head in 1942; she sat in a corner of his study at No. 10 Downing Street while he worked on dispatches. It was a fractious job, frequently hanging up on the business of his cigar. Churchill declined to remove it. At long last, with the connivance of Mrs. Churchill, Miss Sheridan persuaded him to forgo the cigar for an hour. Then she quickly modeled his mouth, put on the other finishing touches, and shipped the work to the Royal Academy, which refused it with the dispatch for which the group is noted. Another bust, by Sir William Reid Dick, was later presented to the Royal Academy by Churchill’s parish of Westerham. This one was accepted.

  The R.A.F. Club in Piccadilly has recently hung a painting of Churchill by Charles Julian Orde, breaking a precedent by having the club’s first likeness of a living person on its walls. In one way or another, Churchill has opened several artistic vistas. His physiognomy affects people curiously. Several years ago, some zestful Australians built a gigantic head of him from wood and adorned it with an eight-foot bamboo cigar. The assembly, in toto, is the sole landmark along the thousand-mile highway between Alice Springs and Darwin. In a similar vein, a Mr. Marsh, of Margate, proposed to erect a statue of Churchill on the cliffs at Dover, so large that it could be seen on a clear day by art lovers in France. For the cigar motif, Marsh designed one that would be illuminated by a big red light bulb in the end. He got an organization together, stimulated an American branch, and began soliciting funds. But it all fell through.

  Churchill likes three portraits of him that were done during the war by Frank Salisbury, who caught him in military moods. Churchill’s favorite is in a standing pose and now hangs in the Constitutional Club. When Mrs. Churchill saw it, she said, “It has a very fierce expression and one that I would not have chosen.” She told him afterward, “It will make everyone terrified of you.” The Prime Minister was agreeably affected, saying, “Surely, in wartime, that is all to the good.” Salisbury is entertaining on the subject of the three works. To begin the first one, he was told to enter the House of Commons, crouch behind the Speaker’s chair, and make sketches during a Churchill address. Soon after this, an aide of the Premier rang Salisbury to say that the subject would shortly visit the artist’s studio. Then the aide rang back to fix the probable time of arrival at 6 P.M. He kept ringing with frequent bulletins. At five fifty-five: “The P.M.’s car is at the door of No. 10”; at six twenty-three: “There is a bustle in the hallway”; at six fifty-five: “He is about to enter the car”; and at seven thirty: “Should be there any minute now.”

  Churchill turned up a few minutes before eight, abruptly took a seat, got out some notes to peruse, and in total silence waved Salisbury to his labors. The silence continued for an hour, at the end of which Churchill arose, stoppe
d briefly by the picture, said, “I do landscapes myself,” and left. A few days later, Salisbury was summoned during an air raid to Churchill’s dugout, where he found the Prime Minister in bed. “I have a fancy for one in battle dress,” the artist was informed. Churchill had slipped into a battle jacket and retained the lower part of his pajamas. The painting turned out successfully; it hangs today in the home of the statesman’s daughter, Mrs. Duncan Sandys, where he often stops to admire it.

  In Painting as a Pastime, Churchill wrote, “To be really happy and safe, one ought to have at least two or three hobbies, and they must all be real.” Hobby-wise, art has remained his first love, but he has faithfully tried to branch out. In 1949 he bought his first race horse, Colonist II. Harking back to his art phase, he selected a jockey’s costume featuring a pink jacket with chocolate-colored sleeves and cap. Bernard Baruch, hearing the news, sent him over a complete set of fine racing silks, and the horse carried them to good advantage when it won its first race. Before very long it was apparent that Churchill was more at home as a race-horse owner than as a player of roulette at Monte Carlo. By now, Colonist II has won nearly thirty thousand dollars, stimulating a sizable expansion of its owner’s stable. Churchill in 1950 had nine horses, seven of them in training. Altogether, his stable properties are worth about a hundred thousand dollars. Both jockeys and trainers wonder at his luck. They think it may have something to do with his pre-race ritual. With a good deal of ceremony, he goes down to give the horse a talking-to. This continues for several minutes. One of the Premier’s friends says, “It might be an exaggeration to describe the horse’s face as apprehensive, but I noticed the same look from sluggish ministers after a wartime Cabinet meeting. In any case, the horse gets into motion pretty fast and keeps glancing back over its shoulder. Winston’s oratory has been producing that same effect throughout the animal kingdom for more than fifty years.”