Winston Churchill and his arch enemy Adolf Hitler didn’t have a lot in common, but one passion they did share was painting: both the heroic wartime prime minister and the genocidal Nazi dictator were keen amateur artists.
While auction houses are reluctant to handle or sell Hitler’s landscapes for obvious reasons, Churchill’s pictures have vastly increased in value since his death. One study of a Moroccan mosque, which the great man painted after the Casablanca conference in 1943, was acquired by actors Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt when they married. After they divorced, Jolie sold the picture in 2021 for £7 million.
Only now, 60 years after Churchill’s death in 1965, will art lovers in Britain get a real chance to judge his artistic ability for themselves when 50 of his previously unseen pictures go on show next May at London’s Wallace Collection gallery. Surprisingly, the retrospective show is to be the first ever exhibition solely dedicated to Churchill’s work.
Churchill took up painting in 1916 during the first world war, when he was in the depths of a deep depression that he called his ‘black dog’. He had been sacked from the cabinet as a scapegoat for the bloody failure of the Gallipoli campaign, which he had championed. By chance, Churchill came upon his sister-in-law ‘Goonie’ practising her hobby of oil painting. Fascinated, he bought oils, canvases and brushes, took art lessons from the Irish artist John Lavery, and plunged straight into his new passion with typical energy and enthusiasm.
He even brought his new painting kit to the trenches of the western front when he took command of a battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers in Flanders. By spooky coincidence, Corporal Hitler was serving as a humble runner a few miles away on the opposite side of the lines. Both men practised their art amid the horrific conditions around them, and Churchill’s earliest surviving pictures depict his battalion HQ near the village of Ploogsteert, while Hitler painted the nearby ruins of Messines church after it had been destroyed by shellfire.
Before the war, the young Hitler had supported himself by painting postcards of buildings in Vienna, the capital of his native Austria. He had twice been rejected after applying for admission to the city’s fine art academy, with tutors criticising his reluctance to depict human beings in his competent but somewhat stiff studies. They advised him to take up architecture rather than art, but though he rejected this advice he retained a fondness for grandiose classical buildings, and commissioned their construction on a huge scale when he became Fuhrer.
Hitler hated modern art and banned it from the Reich, even organising an exhibition called ‘degenerate art’ in Munich at which the work of many modernist masters was mocked and ridiculed. Churchill also voiced contempt for contemporary non-representational art, and told his friend, the animal artist Alfred Munnings, that he would ‘kick Picasso up the arse’ if he ever encountered him in Piccadilly.
Both men practised their art amid the horrific conditions around them
Nonetheless, Churchill’s paintings, though also representational and eschewing portraits, display a freer, looser style than the formal, draughtsmanlike work of his wartime foe. He found painting a welcome escape from the worries of the darkening political scene between the wars, and even wrote a book, Painting as a Pastime, extolling the joys of his hobby. His easel always accompanied him on his travels, and another favourite subject was the gardens and lake at Chartwell, his beloved country home in Kent.
Though Hitler is despised for his kitsch artistic taste, Churchill’s opinion of contemporary art was just as conservative. When the House of Commons commissioned the artist Graham Sutherland to paint a portrait of him to mark Churchill’s 80th birthday in 1954, the prime minister detested the finished work, complaining that it made him look like a constipated geriatric ‘straining at his stool’. He took the portrait back to Chartwell, where his wife Clementine and his private secretary Grace Hamblin later had it burned – an unpardonable act of ingratitude and vandalism, as it was a magnificent work of art.
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