Winston Churchill, Britain's wartime prime minister, was also a prolific amateur painter, as a new exhibition at the Wallace Collection in London reveals. The show, 'Winston Churchill: The Painter', brings together nearly 60 of his works, acquired from across the UK and private collections. Churchill himself described his paintings as 'daubs', and they are indeed the output of a Sunday painter, more about stress relief than artistic mastery.
The paintings have an overpowering joy and charming amateurishness, made for pleasure with no pretension. Churchill's best works are seascapes of the south of France, where he demonstrates a love of bright, simplistic but dazzlingly contrasting colours. However, his figures and donkeys in Marrakech scenes are less successful, and would make LS Lowry blush.
Churchill adopted techniques from Walter Sickert, including establishing an initial monochrome layer and using a projector to transfer compositions from photographs onto canvas. This explains the bizarre sensation of scenes that feel adjacent to any action, with poor pictorial compositions giving a skewed feeling of an uninhabited world.
The exhibition is a curio for those interested in fine art and in Churchill as a historical figure. It includes his eyeglasses and beloved palette loaned from Blenheim Palace. That Churchill gifted his modest creations to US presidents, including Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower, tells of a kind of genteel diplomacy that now feels totally archaic.
