Churchill’s only painting completed during the war is sold by Angelina Jolie for record £8.25m

A PAINTING by Sir Winston Churchill has been sold by Angelina Jolie for a record £8.25 million at auction.

The landscape by the wartime prime minister is the only painting he completed as he led the country though the Second World War.

The 1943 oil on canvas work, titled Tower of the Koutoubia Mosque, was expected to sell for £2.5million, which would have made it a record for one of Churchill’s works, but far exceeded expectations when it was bought in the sale by Christie’s auction house.

Though he created more than 500 works during his lifetime, this painting, which depicts the sunset over Marrakesh, was composed for his friend and ally US president Franklin D Roosevelt after the 1943 Casablanca Conference. It was subsequently sold by Roosevelt’s son in 1950.

More than 60 years later it was bought by actress Jolie and her thenhusband Brad Pitt from a New Orleans antique dealer. The sale of the painting comes five years after their divorce in 2016 where they divided the art collection they shared.

Churchill was a keen painter after picking it up later in life at the age of 40 and even took his easel and brushes to the trenches to paint behind the lines of the Great War.

His style and subjects varied from oil canvases, like his depiction of Marrakesh, to “bottle-scapes” – a landscape that he made of alcohol bottles.

The work sold at Christie’s has been called his “best painting” showing the closeness between the two leaders by capturing the Moroccan sunset which he and Roosevelt witnessed after agreeing to push for the Axis forces’ unconditional surrender.