Wallace Collection, London
Intended to relieve the stresses of office, especially during wartime, Churchill’s amateurish works have an overpowering joy – but his donkeys would make Lowry blush
Winston Churchill, British prime minister during the second world war and again in the 1950s, was firstly a politician and statesman, but secondly a painter. He was not an artist though. He described his paintings as “daubs”: they are the amateur output of a Sunday painter, more about mild stress relief than technically efficient vehicles intended for iconographic messages. There is an innocent charm in Churchill’s declaration that “the simplest objects have their beauty” – and in his encouraging others to paint too, without seeking fame or recognition. He exhibited modestly, and anonymously, in minor salons in the 1920s. Squinting (very) hard just about reveals the colourist efforts of perhaps a very minor impressionist-leaning painter, to be charitable, though any relation to the existing art historical canon is irrelevant: the works are of interest because of the identity of their creator, and as primary historical sources. They record where he was, when, and what he saw: variously stately mansions while staying with friends; bottles of his favourite tipples; Blenheim Palace and its grounds; holidaying in the French Riviera; and, inevitably, views while travelling as a statesman, such as Jerusalem in 1921, shortly after the Cairo Conference, which he chaired as colonial secretary under prime minister Lloyd George.
Curators Xavier Bray and Lucy Davis wisely avoid reading political views into these scenes, though can’t resist insinuating the odd symbolic link, such as between a cannon pointing out to sea in The Beach at Walmer (c 1938), a favourite bathing spot of the Churchill family, and his contemporaneous public warnings against Nazi Germany.
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