The art of statesmanship

In 1915 Sir Winston Churchill was a broken man: widely held responsible for the catastrophe at Gallipoli, out of Cabinet, a political outcast. A lesser man, with fewer passions, might have intellectually collapsed. Yet, it was at the lowest ebb of his career that Churchill discovered a much-needed lifeline out of politics: the joy of painting. If we take his word for it, this happened par hasard, when he found a child’s paintbox in a summer garden in Surrey: ‘Like a sea-beast fished up from the depths…my veins threatened to burst from the fall in pressure…and then it was that the Muse of Painting came to my rescue’, as he confessed later.

From then on, he remained an autodidact, learning as he went and with the critical help of friends – we see, for example, Churchill’s portrait of Sir John Lavery, his neighbour and friend, one of the professional artists willing to support him in his first steps. Paul Maze and Sir William Nicholson were others, sometimes painting en plein air with Churchill in Chartwell or elsewhere. The Wallace Collection exhibition on Churchill the painter is the occasion to ask how good he really was.

The Wallace Collection exhibition on Churchill the painter is the occasion to ask how good he really was

This exhibition takes us from the war-torn landscape of Ploegsteert in Flanders to the sunny climes of the Côte d’Azur and Churchill’s friends’ châteaux, the stately English homes he enjoyed on long country weekends, and on to the desert hills of Morocco and the villas of Italy. Through these varied paintings we see Churchill whole: the bon viveur who loved fine hospitality; the avid traveller; the man fascinated by war; above all the painter drawn to water, which recurs across his oeuvre more insistently than any other subject. Almost sixty paintings, many from private collections, are interspersed with curios from his life: for example, the last bottle of champagne (Pol Roger, of course) he drank in 1965, his painting eyeglasses and brushes, and a first edition of his pamphlet on painting.

In Churchill’s paintings, form and surface count for little, sometimes barely registering, and the whole attention falls on the relations of colour on the canvas. He loved painting the sea and he eventually came to render the water, in his own phrase, in “innumerable small separate lozenge-shaped points and patches of colour…so that it looked more like a tessellated pavement than a marine picture.” A fine example of this is the “twenty-minute sketch of Lake Carezza”, and his arresting scenes of Cap d’Ail and Lake Maggiore, where the blue is caught by “this multitude of tiny points of varied colour”, no single manufactured blue being equal to it. Anyone who has looked down on the Aegean from a hillside will nod in agreement with Sir Winston. The best instance may be Sunset at Cannes Harbour of the 1930s, its reflections built from many hues, the play of light and shadow rendered in the true vein of the Impressionists. 

Morocco drew the same eye away from water and onto stone and light. It was here, in January 1943, that Churchill painted the Tower of the Koutoubia Mosque — the only picture he made during the entire war, snatched after the Casablanca conference when he carried Roosevelt south to watch the sun set on the mountains and afterwards gave to the President, one of several canvases Churchill placed with the powerful, enlisting his art in the work of diplomacy.

Churchill emerges as a traditional painter, in his tastes, subjects, and practice — and indeed there is nothing wrong with that. If anything, it seems refreshing. He believed in studying “the achievements of the great Captains of the past”, in painting as in war, two subjects never far away in his mind. A lover of the British masters, of Turner above all, the Francophile Churchill was nonetheless drawn to what he called “the modern French School.”  In the landscapes the debt to Matisse, Cézanne, and Monet is plain – the painters who, in his words, had ‘so wonderfully vivified, brightened, and illuminated modern landscape painting.’

One painting stands out because it reveals both Churchill’s method and his cast of mind. In his essay on painting, he insisted how important ‘a trained, accurate, retentive memory must be to an artist’, the picture to be studied and devoured, then reproduced from recollection. Influenced by Walter Sickert, he found a means to that end in photography. The Beach at Walmer, painted around 1938, shows his family bathing, seen from behind but the idyll is interrupted by the heavy bulk of a coastal gun trained out to sea. It is one of the few places where the curators draw out a political reading, glossing the cannon as pointing “towards continental Europe and its deeply uncertain future.” The painting was worked up from a photograph Churchill himself took — shown beside it — and here his appetite for science and technology entered his practice: a projector, the magic lantern of Sickert’s phrase, threw the photograph to scale onto the canvas to guide the artist’s hand. 

Then the stately homes of England. Churchill enjoyed a fine country weekend, and we can enjoy his paintings of the houses he visited: Ightham Mote, the medieval manor whose moat he caught in reflection; Sutton Place, with its splendid garden; Warren House, with its striking Italianate loggia. Elsewhere the baroque portico of Cranborne Manor, seat of the Cecils, and Wilton House of the Earls of Pembroke, where he painted the famous Palladian Bridge. From Blenheim, his birthplace, come both the grounds and the resplendent state rooms, hung with the tapestries that commemorate the victories of the first Duke of Marlborough. But no house Churchill loved painting more than his own Chartwell, and the Goldfish Pool — water, foliage, and stone composed into a study of real harmony — pleased him enough that he chose it to illustrate his booklet Painting as a Pastime when it came out in 1948. In all this we glimpse Churchill the patrician, a bridge between Victorian and modern Britain, the connoisseur of the good life who painted Jug with Bottles and, my own favourite in the show, Bottlescape — its brandy and its inevitable Pol Roger rendered with such relish that I have bought a print to hang above my drinks cabinet.

“If it weren’t for painting, I couldn’t live. I couldn’t bear the strain of things”, Churchill told Sir John Rothenstein, then Director of the Tate. He was an ardent believer in keeping more than one hobby, and he kept several — hunting, golf, the writing of history all engaged him — but only painting absorbed him entirely. “It is another fine day,” he once wrote, “& I am off to the river to catch pictures — much better than salmon.”

Churchill, alone among them, took up the brush and in doing so left one of the finest examples we have of a politician with a hinterland

Churchill held that the statesman must cultivate hobbies and fresh interests as a matter of the first importance, that politics should not be the be-all and end-all. A second, absorbing pursuit, he thought, gave the overworked mind the one thing rest alone could not: something new to take hold of. The instinct is shared by the better sort of politician. Roy Jenkins wrote political biographies, Denis Healey published his photographs, Alec Douglas-Home hunted and shot, even Ted Heath sailed and conducted. Churchill, alone among them, took up the brush and in doing so left one of the finest examples we have of a politician with a hinterland.

And yet, as he confided to his devoted wife in his final years, “every ambition I have ever had has been fulfilled – save one: I am not a great painter.” What the visitor to this exhibition might remark is that he was at least a fine one.