BLOOD , SWEAT AND OILS
In his darkest hours Churchill created his finest art. And even the usually scornful Francis Bacon approved...
Churchill: The Statesman As Artist David Cannadine Bloomsbury €30
Until the age of 40, Winston Churchill took no interest in art. Then, in 1915, after he had been forced to resign as First Lord of the Admiralty, he fell into such a deep depression that his wife, Clemmie, thought he might ‘die of grief’. At this point, his sister-in-law bought him an easel and paint brushes, and persuaded him to try his hand at painting.
This present in many ways transformed his life. Thirty years later, he recalled the moment he first put oil on canvas. ‘The empty brush hung poised, heavy with destiny, irresolute in the air. My hand seemed arrested by 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.’
As he remembered it, a painter friend then turned up, splashed some blue on the canvas and told him to stop being so sheepish. ‘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 in awe of a canvas since.’
Yet he remained in awe of great painters for the rest of his life, taking regular lessons from Sickert, Lavery and Sir William Nicholson, and visiting galleries to study the masters. ‘When Winston took up painting in 1915, he had never up to that moment been in a picture gallery,’ Clemmie told Churchill’s doctor, Lord Moran. But it all changed after he had been given those paints. ‘He went with me to the National Gallery and, pausing before the first picture, a very ordinary affair, he appeared absorbed in it. For half an hour, he studied its technique minutely. Next day, he again visited the Gallery, but I took him in this time by the left entrance instead of the right, so that I might at least be sure that he would not return to the same picture.’
Before long, he began to associate painting with happiness. ‘If it weren’t for painting, I couldn’t live. I couldn’t bear the strain of things,’ he confided to the then director of the Tate Gallery, John Rothenstein. He reached for his brushes whenever he felt the approach of what he called the ‘black dog’ of depression. For instance, when he lost the first post-war general election in 1945, he took his brushes and paints to Lake Como and produced 15 paintings within a month. ‘I paint all day and have banished care and disillusionment to the shades,’ he said.
The distinguished historian David Cannadine has now produced a modest little book, immodestly priced, on Churchill and art. It consists of a substantial, workmanlike introduction by Cannadine, followed by a section devoted to Churchill’s own musings on art, and a further section on what others wrote about him as an artist.
Most interesting and informative of all are, of course, the paintings themselves. Thirty-two of them (out of a lifetime’s work of 500 or so) are reproduced in colour, though each is reduced in size to something smaller than a postcard. Most are landscapes and seascapes, with one or two still lives. Churchill’s technique is, as even the outspoken Francis Bacon once acknowledged, ‘not to be scorned’: most people would be happy to have these richly coloured, well-executed pictures on their walls, regardless of who painted them.
As it happens, in 1947 Churchill put their value to the test by submitting two of them pseudonymously – under the name of ‘David Winter’ – for possible inclusion in the Royal Academy Summer exhibition. Both paintings were given the thumbs-up by the judges, and only then was the artist’s identity revealed.
As a painter he was self-confident but never arrogant. He recognised both his strengths and his limitations. In his regular addresses to the Royal Academy, he was always careful to draw a line between himself, ‘a humble amateur’, and the professionals. In his book Painting As A
Pastime (1948) he gave this advice to his fellow amateurs: ‘Leave to the masters of art trained by a lifetime of devotion the wonderful process of picture-making and
‘As a painter he was self-confident but never arrogant. He recognised his limitations.’
picture-creation. Go out into the sunlight and be happy with what you see.’
Sometimes, he was almost over-eager to accept advice from those he respected. When John Rothenstein paid a visit to his studio at Chartwell, Churchill told him he would be grateful for any criticism: ‘Speak, I pray, with absolute frankness.’ After a champagne-fuelled lunch, Rothenstein took him at his word, and voiced various objections to a landscape, painted 20 years before.
‘Oh,’ said Churchill, ‘I can put that right at once; it would take less than quarter of an hour.’
With that, he immediately began searching for the right brushes and paints for the job. It was only when Rothenstein protested that he wouldn’t be able to recapture the mood of 20 years ago that he reluctantly agreed to leave things be.
Yet he took painting seriously, and had interesting things to say about it. I remember the great art historian Ernst Gombrich in his book Art And
Illusion quoting with approval Churchill on the role of memory in painting, and it is clear that he remained endlessly fascinated by the effects of light and colour. He once recalled studying a picture by Cézanne of a blank wall of a house: ‘Now I often amuse myself when I am looking at a wall or a flat surface of any kind by trying to distinguish all the different colours and tints which can be discerned upon it… You would be astonished the first time you tried this to see how many and what beautiful colours there are even in the most commonplace objects, and the more carefully and frequently you look the more variations do you perceive.’ It’s worth mentioning here that the standard view that Churchill scorned all modern art is simply not true. He wrote approvingly of Monet, Manet and Matisse, copied paintings by Cézanne, and studied books on Van Gogh. ‘Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse,’ he once said. David Cannadine is so taken with this particular statement that within the course of this slim volume he allows it to be repeated, word for word, three times over. There is, it must be said, a lot of repetition and stringing-out in these pages. For instance, do we really need to read all Churchill’s dutiful back-slappings of longforgotten painters – ‘Mr Arnseby Brown is, as always, a standby and a mainstay of the show’ – from his various speeches to the Royal Academy? Cannadine is strangely reticent about Churchill’s hatred of Graham Sutherland’s brutal portrait of him in old age, a gift from parliament on his 80th birthday, which Clemmie famously, or infamously, destroyed. He mentions the episode only in passing, which is strange in a book devoted to Churchill and art. Similarly, he whitewashes Augustus John’s caustic memories of Churchill’s vanity as a sitter: ‘How else to explain those fits and starts, these visits to the mirror, this preoccupation with the window curtains, and the nervous fidgeting with the jowl?’ Nevertheless, it’s good to be reminded of the joy Churchill found in painting. He called it ‘bottled sunshine’, and said that ‘when I get to heaven, I mean to spend a considerable portion of my first million years in painting’. With him at his deathbed, his daughter Sarah saw his hand move, ‘as if already grasping for the heavenly paintbrush that might yet await him’.