Draft portrait destroyed by Churchill on sale for £800k
A FIRST draft of a Winston Churchill portrait, so despised by the wartime prime minister that it was later burnt, is set to be sold for the first time.
The Crown series dedicated an entire episoide to the painting which was commissioned by Parliament for his 80th birthday. Churchill despised the finished birthday gift so much that the painting was burnt by his staff.
However, an early study was passed on to the Ogilvy family, distant relatives of King Charles, and this surviving work will now be auctioned by Sotheby’s on June 6. It is valued at about £800,000.
Marking 150 years since Churchill’s birth, this study will be put on public display in the room in which he was born at Blenheim Palace. Sotheby’s expert Andre Zlattinger has suggested that Churchill “quite possibly” would have preferred the rough study to the eventual finished painting, saying: “He had seen some studies and was quite excited by the portrait.”
Graham Sutherland, a celebrated painter, was chosen to create the portrait of Churchill in time for his birthday in 1954. Churchill was barred from wearing his preferred robes of the Order of the Garter, and kept from properly inspecting the work while it was being painted. It depicts the aged prime minister slouched in a chair in a brown suit, clinging to the arms with his face turned upward.
He refused to hang the piece in Downing Street. The surviving preparatory study shows Churchill gazing out of the window of his office at the Chartwell estate in Kent.
It is understood it is the first oil study of the infamous collaboration between Sutherland and Churchill to be sold.
‘Churchill had seen some of the studies created by Sutherland and was quite excited by the portrait’