He wrote about his enjoyment of painting in two articles published in The Strand Magazine in December 1921 and January 1922, Hobbies and Painting as a pastime, for which he was paid £1,000. He painted the pyramids when he visited Egypt as Secretary of State for the Colonies for the Cairo Conference in 1921, to determine arrangements for the government of Iraq and Transjordan under British control. Several of his landscape works were sold, at £30 each. The following month, the first public exhibition of his paintings was held at the Galerie Druet in Paris, with Churchill exhibiting under his pseudonym of "Charles Morin". 1920s Ĭhurchill became Secretary of State for the Colonies in February 1921. His Portrait of Sir John Lavery in his Studio was shown at the annual exhibition of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters in London in 1919. He received direction and encouragement from several professional artists, including his London neighbour Sir John Lavery, and later also Walter Sickert, William Nicholson and Paul Maze. He continued to paint after he returned to government as Minister of Munitions in 1917. Ĭhurchill took painting materials to the Western Front when he went on active military service in 1915–16, painting the towns and landscape near Ploegsteert Wood in Flanders where he commanded the 6th Battalion, Royal Scots Fusiliers. He began with watercolour but soon applied himself to oils. He freely admitted that it revived his spirits and, as with writing, became an antidote to his frequent bouts of depression. He was immediately captivated and painting became a lifelong hobby. She invited him to take her brush and try it for himself. Goonie was an amateur artist and Churchill watched her painting a watercolour. In June, he hired Hoe Farm, a country house in Hascombe near Godalming in Sussex, for a holiday with various members of his family, one of whom was his sister-in-law, Lady Gwendoline ("Goonie") Churchill (1885–1941), his brother's wife. He was somewhat depressed about that turn of events and was worried about the direction his career might take in the future. In May 1915, in the wake of the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign for which Churchill was widely held to be responsible, he had been removed from his post as First Lord of the Admiralty with demotion to Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. He sold some works, but he also gave away many of the works that he self-deprecatingly described as "daubs" as gifts. He continued this hobby into his old age, painting over 500 pictures of subjects such as his goldfish pond at Chartwell and the landscapes and buildings of Marrakesh. Winston Churchill was introduced to painting during a family holiday in June 1915, when his political career was at a low ebb. The studio that Churchill built for himself at Chartwell in the 1930s Cannadine says that it is one of his earliest pieces, painted when he was still depressed after the failure of the Dardanelles expedition. One MP called the portrait “a study in lumbago,” and Lord Hailsham said it was “disgusting, ill-mannered, terrible.” Churchill accepted the gift with a measured good humor, but privately he muttered, “It makes me look half-witted, which I ain’t.” After the unveiling, the painting was never seen again - shortly before Churchill’s death, his wife had it cut up and burned.An early self-portrait by Churchill showing him with a palette, dated to 1919/20. “The artist had obviously been unhappy about them and they had been painted over since it would have been impossible to ‘cut off’ his legs below the knees without radically altering the proportions and placing of the picture on the canvas.” “Its chief defect was that it looked unfinished in as much as his feet were concealed in a carpet that seemed to have sprouted a dun-coloured grass,” wrote Studio editor G.S. The painting, by Graham Sutherland, was a decidedly modern take on the octogenarian statesman. The ceremony took place before a crowded Westminster Hall, and no one present, one observer said, “will forget the idiosyncratic nonsound with which a thousand people stopped breathing when the canvas was revealed.” Winston Churchill faced an awkward moment in 1954, when Parliament unveiled a portrait on the occasion of his 80th birthday.
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