Churchill on Canvas Illuminates London’s Wallace Collection

It is one of the great oddities of twentieth century history that Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler were both enthusiastic and accomplished amateur painters. However, while the Führer’s pictures are regarded as being beyond the pale for all but the most committed of collectors, Churchill’s paintings continue to sell for millions to keen aficionados of his artwork.Still, even for those of us who regard Churchill as one of the great men of history, it has always been harder to consider him in the pantheon of great artists. He himself was under no illusions as to his talent, lightly dismissing his work as “daubs,” but “Winston Churchill: The Painter,” a comprehensive and often fascinating new retrospective — the first since his death in 1965 — at London’s Wallace Collection makes the strongest possible case for a modest reassessment of his abilities.Churchill began painting in his forties, to alleviate the considerable stresses of the First World War, and later wrote of his pastime that it was “complete as a distraction. I know of nothing which, without exhausting the body, more entirely absorbs the mind.” He was optimistic that the activity would come good, chirruping to his wife Clementine that “I think painting will be a great pleasure and resource to me — if I come through all right.”It was the knowledge that the war might bring both his life and nascent career to an end that might be expected to give his early paintings a sense of urgency and darkness. Yet the striking thing about early canvases displayed here, such as 1916’s “Plug Street” series of paintings, is how bright and clear they are: the polar opposite of grittier, grimmer contemporary work by artists such as Otto Dix and Paul Nash.‘Plug Street,’ by Winston Churchill, 1916-1917. Detail. National Trust, Chartwell.The striking thing about viewing Churchill’s oeuvre in one place, in fact, is how both remarkably upbeat and intentionally unchallenging it all is. While he was a friend and enthusiastic student of such major British painters as Walter Sickert and William Nicholson, he swiftly understood his own limitations. He was little good at painting people, although there are a couple of accomplished 1915 portraits, one of himself and one of his other mentor John Lavery — and never attempted to push himself beyond what he saw as his strengths.Which is not to say that his work does not contain ambiguity or intellectual interest. Another early work, “Branksome Dene,” is a seascape, but there is something almost chilling about its bleak expanses that brings the close of Larkin’s poem “High Windows” to mind:“And beyond it, the deep blue air, that showsNothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.”The significance being, as explained by the remarkably well-informed and blessedly apolitical gallery notes, that Churchill nearly died at the age of eighteen when he fell from a footbridge at the location. This is not the sea of swashbucklers and shivering timbers, but something more alien and incomprehensible. ‘Branksome Dene,’ by Winston Churchill, 1916. Detail. Churchill Heritage LtdIt was a theme he returned to a couple of decades later in one of the most striking works displayed here, 1938’s”The Beach at Walmer.” At first glance, it is a depiction of Churchill and his family bathing in the English coast, but the entire right side of the painting is dominated by an enormous cannon, facing out to sea. Given that the artwork was created a year before the outbreak of WWII, when only a fool — or Neville Chamberlain — could not see that cataclysmic conflict was imminent, the inference was obvious. It was no coincidence that it ended up being given to Churchill’s chief aide-de-camp Hastings “Pug” Ismay as a reward at his request after the end of war. Ismay commented of the painting that “it was Winston, standing guard on the coast while England played”.If one were to visit this exhibition with no knowledge who Winston Churchill was, they would find relatively few indications of his military and political greatness. But there is a great deal of information about his love of landscapes and exotic climates. He was a regular visitor to Morocco and, in particular, the famous La Mamounia hotel in Marrakech, where he often painted. But there are a few hints as to his inimitable character, not least in the still lives “Bottlescape and Jugs and Bottles,” painted in the 1920s and 1930s and showing a vast assortment of Churchill’s favorite tipples, including, naturally, his beloved Pol Roger champagne, which had been corralled into the picture by means of his sending his family round the house — or, as Winston put it with typical grandiosity, telling them to “fetch me associate and fraternal bottles to form a bodyguard to this magnificent container”.The exhibition suggests that Churchill was technically accomplished and capable of a modest degree of virtuosity as an artist without ever making the case for lasting greatness in the field. Much is made of his having two paintings entered anonymously, under the pseudonym “David Winter,” into the Royal Academy’s prestigious Summer Exhibition in 1947, and being accepted on that basis. It should also be remembered that, in the outpouring of understandable gratitude that came after the Allied victory in 1945, Churchill had been named an Honorary Academician Extraordinary by the RA and had been advised by the RA’s president, his friend Sir Alfred Munnings, to try his hand; the suspicion that a quiet word was had somewhere persists.‘The Beach at Walmer,’ by Winston Churchill, 1938. Detail. Churchill Heritage Ltd.Set against this, “Winston Churchill: The Painter” is a sufficiently diverting and enjoyable display of fifty or so canvases to distract anyone from the most obsessive Churchillphile to someone merely seeking an hour or so’s edification in central London. It helps that the exhibition has corralled none other than Sir Gary Oldman, an Oscar-winner for playing Churchill in the 2017 film “Darkest Hour,” into reading apposite excerpts of the great man’s 1921 essay “Painting as a Pastime” on its audio guide, which gives a welcome sense of Churchill himself and his witty, self-deprecating spirit.‘Cap d’Ail, Alpes-Maritimes,’ by Winston Churchill, 1952. Detail. Royal Academy of Arts. Churchill Heritage LtdBy the end of the exhibition, it is hard not to be affected by the politician-painter’s hopes for how he would develop his skills in the afterlife: “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 vermilion will be the darkest, dullest colors upon it, and beyond them will be a whole range of wonderful new colors which will delight the celestial eye.”‘Winston Churchill: The Painter’ is at the Wallace Collection until 29 November. https://www.wallacecollection.org/whats-on/exhibitions-displays/winston-churchill-the-painter/

Churchill on Canvas Illuminates London’s Wallace Collection

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