“We have been told that Faust sold his soul for the right to command the moment to remain,” Winston Churchill told the politicians and artists gathered at the Royal Academy’s summer banquet. “Without the slightest prejudice to their future destination,” Churchill continued, artists have “the power to command the moment to remain, not only for their own advantage and reputation, but for the pleasure of everyone else.”
In a single turn of phrase, Churchill managed to beatify half the room and damn the other. Whereas an artist’s Faustian bargain was to capture a moment for all to enjoy, the politician’s deal with the devil was for enduring power and influence. Churchill would know. By the time he offered these remarks in 1927, he had run for office as a Conservative, as a Liberal, as a short-lived “Constitutionalist,” and then again as a Conservative. Lord Asquith had already kicked him out of his government following the devastating defeat at Gallipoli, and Churchill had spent several years rehabilitating his image commanding men in the trenches of World War I Belgium.
Churchill would make both Faustian bargains in his life, as a politician and artist. Yet for historians more familiar with battlefield strategy than compositional form, Churchill’s artistic legacy is often swept into the dustbin.
In the latest biography by Andrew Roberts, one of Churchill’s preeminent historians, just three pages out of 1,500 are devoted to the statesman’s artistic legacy. Yet painting was one of the most enduring and enriching activities he embraced in his lifetime. The signs are there: a prodigious output of over 544 canvases; a longstanding relationship with Britain’s Royal Academy, eclipsed only by his relationship with the House of Commons; and a traveling exhibition of his work that garnered a public response unlike any in the 20th century. When Dwight D. Eisenhower convinced a gallery in the Midwest to exhibit his work (and convinced Churchill to allow them), it sparked Churchill’s creative apotheosis across the world’s English-speaking countries. At the Art Institute of Chicago, the director’s decision to decline the traveling exhibition caused such a furor he was forced to resign. In London, gallery goers lined up around the block of the Royal Academy to see Churchill’s work. The only other artist drawing larger crowds at the time was Leonardo da Vinci.
A new book by British biographer David Cannadine sets out to highlight Churchill’s artistic legacy, or least pull it from the heap of his political accomplishments. Published this past fall, Churchill: The Statesman as Artist traces Churchill’s artistic development and influences. Alongside a biographical essay, Cannadine has collected all of Churchill’s known writings on art and has paired them with a selection of writings by Churchill’s art world contemporaries, providing a window into how his art was perceived in his own time.
Was Churchill a “good artist”? Cannadine dodges the question by calling him a “successful amateur,” and rightfully so. The motivations that drive professional artists, to create artwork original enough to attract patrons and posterity, were the least of Churchill’s concerns. He painted to “command the moment to remain,” to capture a moment for himself when the rest of his life was decided by committee and public opinion.
The Faustian bargain that drove Churchill to seek an enduring impact in politics also drove him to the canvas. When he was forced to resign as First Admiral following Gallipoli, the sudden plummet from political influence brought on a deep-seated depression. “Like a sea-beast fished up from the depths, or a diver too suddenly hoisted, my veins threatened to burst from the fall in pressure,” he wrote later in life.
The sudden shift in political fortune led Churchill to art. Listless and depressed, he rented a country home in Surrey with his wife Clementine, far away from the political establishment that so quickly shunned them. While family visited one weekend, his brother’s wife Goonie, an artist herself, encouraged him to pick up the brush.
At 39, Churchill took to painting immediately. It likely didn’t take much prodding; painting was a common pastime in the military. Officers trained in the close observation of terrain could transfer those skills to the sketchbook, while lightweight supplies could be toted to any colonial outpost. And the skills sharpened at Westminster translated to the canvas as well. As Churchill noted in his Faustian Bargain speech, art resembles politics. When crafting the “policy of a nation, or planning a battle on sea or land, you would come across the same sort of decisions and complex compositions requiring flair and judgement as are always presented in the course of painting any large or serious picture.” The complementary traits of art and military strategy also tempted Ulysses S. Grant at West Point, not to mention Churchill’s peers, including General Eisenhower, Field Marshall Harold Alexander, and Field Marshall Sir Claude Auchinleck.
As suggested by a remarkable output of over 544 paintings, Churchill would go on to prioritize painting above his other non-political activities. What caused him to dedicate so much time—which surely could be spent on more practical pursuits—to pushing paint around? Unlike the shifting frontlines of a battlefield or political career, a canvas painted is territory forever won. Yet in the process of winning it, any mistakes made in oil paint could be easily erased. “One sweep of the palette-knife ‘lifts’ the blood and tears of a morning from the canvas and enables a fresh start to be made; indeed the canvas is all the better for past impressions,” he wrote in 1948. Amidst the terrible loss of lives at Gallipoli and the early derailing of his career, Churchill took solace in the malleability of a canvas and paints.
Amidst the terrible loss of lives at Gallipoli and the early derailing of his career, Churchill took solace in the malleability of a canvas and paints.
In war, the result is never final. Carl von Clausewitz’s observation on the impermanence of victory could have been Churchill’s catchphrase, given the unceasing “blood, toil, tears and sweat” that he offered the British Empire. But when painting, he had complete control, with no committees or constituents to appease. All personal choice and no public consequence, each canvas was a moment permanently captured. In doing so, he strengthened his mental defenses against the impermanence of victory that marked his career.
Self-Portrait, 1920
© National Trust / Charles Thomas
Cannadine provides 32 examples of Churchill’s work, beginning with a spectral self-portrait painted during his political exile after Gallipoli. Accustomed to Churchill’s bright public talents, our eyes have to re-adjust to the humbler glow of his art. The persuasive power we associate with Churchill’s writing is largely absent from his canvases. He eschewed grand subjects in favor of modest landscapes, interior settings, and still lives of items scrounged around Chartwell.
In an early self-portrait, painted around 1920, Churchill’s pale figure is nearly subsumed by black shadows pressing in on all sides. A sharp light glances off his face, illuminating his tightly set mouth and hollowed eyes. Churchill portrays himself as a weary figure, diminished yet resolute.
Following this early self-portrait, Churchill’s artwork becomes curiously immune to the darkness and disruption of war-ravaged England. He painted the ornate interiors of Blenheim, Chartwell, and his friends’ country estates. The settings of his travels throughout Europe, Egypt, and Morocco also captured his attention. Much like his speeches, his paintings are animated by an abundance of color. While presiding over the Cairo Conference as Colonel Secretary in 1921, Churchill created one of his finest early works. In a painting of the Great Pyramids, silhouettes of the commanding structures are dashed in plum and orange. Around them, blue and gold is woven into a prismatic sky that belies impressionist influences. When he wasn’t painting, his days in Cairo were filled with intense negotiations over Sykes-Picot and the Balfour Declaration. Each canvas became a brief refuge, a unit of time, space, and deliberation belonging solely to Churchill.
The Pyramids, 1921 © The Churchill Heritage Ltd. Photo credit: National Trust Images
The intensely personal nature of Churchill’s artwork might surprise viewers expecting to see his public persona rendered on canvas. While he occasionally submitted artwork to juried exhibitions (under a pseudonym, to dissuade overgenerous assessments), he was humble in his artistic ambitions. Missing from his canvases are the grand narratives, calculated sophistication, or consciously autobiographical details that often mark the work of a career artist. As a hobbyist, Churchill painted for an audience of one, or occasionally two or three if he was gifting his hosts with a canvas.
Churchill’s appetite for experimentation was generous and unprejudiced. A still life of a metal canister might carry the earthbound tones and smooth finish of social realism, while a villagescape that same year is built from vibrant, impressionistic brushstrokes. He briefly embraced photo-sensitive canvases, which created the ghost of a photo’s image to guide painting. While these canvases reflect finer technical execution, it’s hard to escape the “paint-by-numbers” quality. Works produced at this time, such as the monochromatic Tea at Chartwell (1928), seemed drained of life and Churchill’s characteristic vibrancy. No matter, the artist would likely respond: “If you try and fail, there is not much harm done. The nursery will grab what the studio has rejected.”
Tea at Chartwell, 1927
© The Churchill Heritage Ltd. Photo credit: National Trust Images
Yet art was serious business for Churchill, as Cannadine proves with his collection of Churchill’s writing, 12 articles, essays and speeches spanning 1912 to 1954. The majority are speeches given by Churchill during the Royal Academy’s annual summer banquet. Cannadine has also unearthed exhibition reviews written by Churchill for the Daily Mail; a speech given at the opening of a naval art exhibition that examines the role of propaganda; and “Painting as Pastime,” a rousing essay on the benefits of painting as a hobby, a call-to-canvas for Britons mired in the postwar gloom. Read together, the writings reveal Churchill’s belief in the importance of free artistic ｅxpression in a world increasingly shaped by cold realpolitik.
During wartime, Churchill often tied creativity to democracy’s cause. Speaking before the Royal Academy’s banquet in 1938, just months before Germany would invade Poland, Churchill examined the dangers of fascism from a painter’s perspective. “In this hard material age of brutal force, we ought indeed to cherish the arts,” he spoke to the assembled crowd. “In another country—which certainly shall be nameless—an artist would be sent to a concentration camp for putting too much green in his sky, or too much blue in his trees.” (An audio recording of the speech highlights Churchill’s comedic delivery.)
More than a clever turn of phrase, Churchill’s banquet speech referenced chilling remarks given by Adolf Hitler in the preceding months. In the lead-up to World War II, Hitler’s cultural division removed over 17,000 works of art from Germany’s museums. Many of these modernist and avant garde works were then organized into an exhibition of “degenerate art” in Munich, staged as a foil to a companion exhibit of “Great German art” that fulfilled Hitler’s Teutonic ideal.
At the opening of the Munich exhibition of “degenerate art,” Hitler said that an artist who paints a sky green, must have done so out of genetic deficiency or to agitate his countrymen. Either scenario would be “deeply regrettable for these unfortunates.” It would require the involvement of the “Reich Ministry of the Interior…to deal with the question of preventing such horrible visual defects from being passed on.” By the end of the speech, Hitler had expanded the reach of his genocidal aspirations. “Every person…participating in this perversion should realize that the hour of his elimination will come sooner or later.” As a failed artist with some technical ability but little originality, Hitler could now control those more creative than himself. Art was now a means of “purifying” Germany’s cultural bloodline.
View of Marrakech, 1943
© National Trust / Charles Thomas
In contrast, Churchill embraced the Royal Academy and its creative output as a symbol of Britain’s priceless freedoms. Speaking at the 1937 banquet, he noted the Academy’s “broad tolerance and fair play” to all artists who submitted artwork to the juried exhibitions, from “dustman to duke.” And he fell along that spectrum. When the Academy resumed its annual summer exhibition after the war ended, Churchill submitted several works for consideration under the pseudonym “David Winter.” Two of them were accepted, and his identity revealed—the first time that a Prime Minister exhibited at the Academy.
If creativity threatened Hitler, Churchill viewed it as a force of regenerative power. In time for Christmas in 1948, several of Churchill’s essays on art were republished in the booklet “Painting as Pastime.” He turns the full power of his persuasion to the recruitment of new amateur painters, offering numerous enticements:
Inexpensive independence, a mobile and perennial pleasure apparatus, new mental food and exercise, the old harmonies and symmetries in an entirely different language, an added interest to every common scene, an occupation for every idle hour, an unceasing voyage of entrancing discovery—these are high prizes. Make quite sure they are not yours. After all, if you try and fail, there is not much harm done. . . you can always go out and kill some animal, humiliate some rival on the links, or despoil some friend across the green table. You will not be worse off in any way.
If an artist’s success is measured by his or her ability to connect with the public, the conservative wartime leader was a fine artist indeed. Public opinion of Churchill improved in the waning years of his life, and traveling exhibitions of his artwork took on the nature of a public benediction. Like the relics of a saint, the canvases carried the promise of personal connection to one of the saviors of liberal democracy, drawing massive crowds wherever they appeared.
Churchill’s first major exhibition took place in 1958, at the Nelson Art Gallery in Missouri. President Eisenhower, a fellow amateur painter himself, convinced both Churchill and the gallery to allow for the display of 30 canvases. The show drew record crowds in Kansas City, and the canvases found welcoming venues all over the United States, including the Met in New York and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The canvases continued their tour, reaching four cities in Canada, seven cities in Australia, and four cities in New Zealand. In each instance, the elected leader of the host country provided the exhibit’s foreword, a tradition that began with President Eisenhower in Kansas City, Missouri.
Cap d’Ail, Alpes-Maritimes, 1952
© The Churchill Heritage Ltd. Photo credit: Royal Academy of Arts
Churchill had long denied requests by British institutions to mount solo exhibitions of his work. But, worn down by the success of the traveling exhibition, he acquiesced. The Royal Academy opened an exhibition of over 60 Churchill canvases, setting visitorship records on its opening day. With wait lines that stretched down Piccadilly, the exhibit’s run time was nearly doubled from three to five months. Critics offered carefully worded praise, noting that the Academy had never hosted an exhibition “by so great a man as Sir Winston Churchill or more joyous paintings.”
Here, Cannadine provides a window into how Churchill’s art was perceived in its time with a selection of six writings by art world contemporaries. Cannadine adds to the canon with a previously unpublished preface written by Augustus John for the Royal Academy’s exhibition catalogue, rife with flattery and self-serving anecdotes. The essay was fortunately scrapped from the catalogue but provides a cringe-worthy example of how Churchill’s power influenced assessments of his artistic talent. Cannadine’s most illuminating find is an essay by John Rothenstein, the former director of England’s Tate Gallery. Five years after Churchill’s death, Rothenstein recounts his visits to the studio at Chartwell and 10 Downing Street. We see Churchill as a living artist with his own eccentricities, strong views on what canvases the Tate might acquire, and a penchant for sending off guests with a double shot of whiskey.
On the day that Japan surrendered during World War II, Churchill stood on the shores of Lake Cuomo with his artist’s palette in hand. Speaking to the young officers who accompanied him, he repeated the words he spoke decades years earlier at the Academy banquet. “Out of a life of long and varied experience, the most valuable piece of advice I could hand on to you is to know how to command the moment to remain.” As many historians have catalogued, Churchill spent most of his life pursuing the Faustian bargain of enduring political influence. But through art, he finally commanded the moment to remain.