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Overview
In his introduction to Churchill: The Statesman as Artist, David Cannadine provides the most important account yet of Churchill's life in art, which was not just a private hobby, but also, from 1945 onwards, an essential element of his public fame. The first part of this book brings together for the first time all of Churchill's writings and speeches on art, not only "Painting as a Pastime," but his addresses to the Royal Academy, his reviews of two of the Academy's summer exhibitions, and an important speech he delivered about art and freedom in 1937.
The second part of the book provides previously uncollected critical accounts of his work by some of Churchill's contemporaries: Augustus John's hitherto unpublished introduction to the Royal Academy exhibition of Churchill's paintings in 1959, and essays and reviews by Churchill's acquaintances Sir John Rothenstein and Professor Thomas Bodkin, and the art critic Eric Newton. The book is lavishly illustrated with reproductions of many of Churchill's paintings, some of them appearing for the first time. Here is Churchill the artist more fully revealed than ever before.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781472945211 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury USA |
| Publication date: | 11/06/2018 |
| Pages: | 192 |
| Sales rank: | 1,125,736 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
INTRODUCTION
by David Cannadine
'Winston sees everything in pictures'
Lord Moran
During the last years of his life, Winston Churchill was often acclaimed as 'the greatest Englishman of his time' and 'the saviour of his country', and he is still regarded by many as 'the most remarkable human being ever to have occupied 10 Downing Street', and as the 'greatest Briton ever to have lived'. Such encomiums, although not universally shared, rightly recognize the extraordinary longevity and outstanding achievements of his public life, as a politician, party leader, prime minister and global statesman, but they also bear witness to the unusual range of Churchill's extra-curricular activities and accomplishments, as (among other things) a soldier and journalist, historian and biographer, bricklayer and bon viveur, polo player and race-horse owner. With the possible exception of Mr Gladstone, no British prime minister of modern times has inhabited so many varied and different hinterlands, or done so with such energy, vigour, brio and élan. And on any list of what Churchill called his 'hobbies', painting eventually came to rank very high, both in terms of the therapy and pleasure that it gave him, and as an important aspect of his latter-day reputation as 'the largest human being of our time'. For while he never claimed to be a great artist, painting would come to occupy a uniquely important place in his recreational repertoire, and it also furnished an essential element of his latter-day public persona as a veritable Renaissance man of exceptionally varied accomplishments. Yet like so many aspects of his long life, Churchill's involvement with oils, brushes, easels and canvasses was more complex and revealing than his own writings on these subjects suggest, and there is more to say about him as an artist than has yet been recognized.
I
Among the hundreds of paintings Churchill completed during his lifetime were many of the interiors and exteriors of Blenheim Palace, and they were one indication of the abiding importance to him of his ancestral home [Figs. 5, 12, 15]. He had been born there in a small ground floor room in November 1874; he proposed to Clementine Hozier in the Temple of Diana in its gardens in the summer of 1908; and he was buried nearby in Bladon churchyard in January 1965. Blenheim also helps explain Churchill's fierce sense of dynastic pride and family loyalty, his preference for a settled, hierarchical social order, and his belief in the Whiggish narrative of providential national greatness which Vanbrugh's monumental mansion triumphantly celebrated and proudly proclaimed. Less often noticed is that during Churchill's early years, Blenheim was still one of the great treasure houses of Britain, meriting comparison with Woburn, Chatsworth, Boughton or Burleigh, for it had been filled with great art collected by John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough. But the family finances had been much diminished since his day, and between 1884 and 1886, the Blenheim Old Masters, including canvasses by Raphael, Breughel, Rembrandt and Holbein, were dispersed in some of the most extraordinary art sales of the nineteenth century. To be sure, a few important works survived, including the portrait of the fourth duke and his family by Sir Joshua Reynolds, which would later be joined by the companion picture which the ninth duke commissioned from John Singer Sargent, some of whose paintings Churchill would later copy [Fig. 33]. But the disappearance of virtually all the best art from Blenheim during Churchill's adolescence may explain why he never evinced any serious interest in European Old Masters, or in traditional English portraiture.
This depletion may also help explain why Churchill would later claim that he had demonstrated no appreciation of art at any time during the first forty years of his life, and that his own creative endeavours had been confined to a few drawings reluctantly and unsuccessfully undertaken while he was at school and serving in the army. Such was his recollection, as reported years later, by Clementine Churchill, and as recorded by his doctor, Lord Moran:
When Winston took up painting in 1915, he had never up to that moment been in a picture gallery. He went with me ... to the National Gallery [in London], and pausing before the first picture, a very ordinary affair, he appeared absorbed in it. For half an hour, he studied its technique minutely. Next day, he again visited the Gallery, but I took him in this time by the left entrance instead of the right, so that I might at least be sure that he would not return to the same picture.
Before that visit, Churchill's closest encounters with art had been his early attendances, beginning in 1908, at the Royal Academy banquets, held in Burlington House on Piccadilly, which were a highlight of the London season and inaugurated the Academy's annual summer exhibition. But he was invited to these gatherings as a member of the Liberal government, not because he was expected to have anything significant to say about sculpture or painting or architecture. When Churchill delivered his first two speeches, in 1912 and 1913, he did so as First Lord of the Admiralty, replying the toast of 'the Navy', and on both occasions he was primarily concerned to assert the continuing and urgent need to maintain Britain's formidable sea power and maritime might. 'Modern ships', he noted in his second speech, almost by way of an afterthought, 'do not afford much ground for artists to work upon.' 'We cannot', he went on, speaking for the Navy as a whole, but also for himself, 'on the aesthetic or the artistic side claim any close acquaintanceship with the Royal Academy.'
Churchill's middle-aged indifference to art was all of a piece with the account that he would later give, in My Early Life (1930), of his academic shortcomings as a schoolboy, where he depicted himself as having been hopeless at mathematics and incapable of mastering Latin or Greek. High learning and high art had not been for him then, and although he had worked hard to make up for his educational shortcomings during his days as a subaltern in late nineteenth-century India, Churchill never fully overcame these cultural limitations and intellectual deficiencies. His knowledge of European languages did not advance much beyond idiosyncratic yet workable schoolroom French. His models in history-writing were not the innovative scholars of his own time, but two men long dead, namely Gibbon and Macaulay. He did not turn hungrily to the works of philosophers, economists or social scientists, and showed no great interest in engaging with Marx or Freud, the great intellectual figures of his youth and middle age. His taste in music never developed further than rousing hymns, Gilbert and Sullivan, Viennese operetta, military marches, 'Land of Hope and Glory' and 'Rule Britannia'. And he was at best indifferent, at worst hostile, to modern, abstract art as it developed during his lifetime in the hands of such innovative masters as Chagall and Picasso. As such, Churchill was neither an intellectual nor an aesthete, but rather a man of action and of affairs, and he always felt insecure when dealing with people such as Balfour, Asquith, Curzon and F. E. Smith, who had benefited from being educated at Oxford or Cambridge Universities.
Yet while it was – and is – easy to dismiss him as being culturally uninformed, intellectually incurious and aesthetically unsophisticated, Churchill also possessed remarkably potent mental machinery, albeit academically untrained, and for a public figure he was also unusually creative and imaginative. Kenneth Clark was not alone in being impressed by the force of his intellect and the range of his interests. 'I have', he recalled, 'never been frightened of anyone except Churchill ... He was a man of a wonderful and very powerful mind.' All his life, Churchill would be fascinated by science, gadgetry and technology, and even if this owed more to Jules Verne and Lord Cherwell than to Einstein or Rutherford, it was a real and genuine preoccupation, which would be appropriately commemorated in the establishment of Churchill College, Cambridge, in 1960, which was originally conceived as a British answer to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was very well read in the conventional literary culture of his class and his time, namely 'the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Scott, Dickens and a little Trollope, topped off with Rudyard Kipling', and to almost the very end of his life, he could recite many lines from Shakespeare and the Romantic poets. From an early age, Churchill was also enthralled by the theatre, he was an avid reader of contemporary fiction, and among those elected to the Other Club, which he had co-founded in 1911 with F. E. Smith, were the writers Arnold Bennett, Anthony Hope, John Buchan and P. G. Wodehouse. Another member was H. G. Wells: despite his maverick, radical views and their resulting political disagreements, Wells's fascination with science and literature mirrored – and may have encouraged – Churchill's own.
But it was also clear to many observers and contemporaries, from General de Gaulle to A. L. Rowse, that 'the artist' in Churchill was 'almost as strong as the politician and soldier', and he owed this to his Spencer forebears, who were more aesthetically inclined than his military-minded Marlborough ancestors, and also to his mother's family, the Jeromes of New York City. Perhaps for this reason, the artistic strain among his relatives was strongly pronounced during the twentieth century. Churchill's nephew, John, who was the eldest son of his younger brother Jack, made a successful career as a sculptor, and as a painter of murals, portraits and frescoes. Churchill helped him on his way, employing him after the Second World War to decorate the summer house at Chartwell with scenes of the Duke of Marlborough's great victories, and John would also embellish a temple at Blenheim Palace for the tenth duke [Fig. 36]. Churchill's cousin, Clare Sheridan, who was the daughter of Lady Randolph Churchill's elder sister, was an accomplished sculptor. One of her largest works was a bust of Lenin that was two and a half times life size, and her ardent support of the leader of Communist Russia scarcely endeared her to her cousin Winston. But she also sculpted two memorable (but smaller) busts of him, one in the 1920s, and a second in the early 1940s. And in later generations, Churchill's daughter Sarah was both an actress and a painter, albeit of sadly unrealized promise, while his grand-daughter Edwina Sandys is a renowned sculptor and artist.
Although widely distributed among his descendants and relatives, these creative impulses were especially pronounced in the case of Churchill himself. From an early age, he seems to have been gifted with the heightened perception of the artist, to whom no scene, no event, no individual was ever dull or humdrum or commonplace. This was most famously true in his use of the English language, which he handled in his conversation, his speeches, his journalism and his books with a sure touch, a sensuous feel and an imaginative brilliance, as he delighted in strong nouns, vivid adjectives, rich imagery, polished antitheses, glowing phrases and powerful rhetorical effects. There was nothing dull or hum-drum or commonplace about Churchill's choice or use of words, and although his paintings lacked the stately splendour, the 'formal magnificence' and the heroic grandeur of his greatest orations, they strikingly resembled them in other ways. For, like his speeches, they were often bright, warm, vivid, highly-coloured and illuminated creations, full of arresting contrasts between the light and the dark, the sunshine and the shadows. Not surprisingly, then, when Churchill later came to write about painting, he revealingly described the ideal finished canvas as resembling 'a long, sustained, interlocking argument', characterized by 'a single unity of conception' – words that would equally apply to the composition and the structure of his finest orations.
Moreover, Churchill not only possessed an unusually powerful rhetorical imagination, but he was also gifted with an equally strong visual sense. Despite his later insistence to the contrary, the drawing classes he took at Harrow and Sandhurst made a lasting impact. Even in his earliest books, describing his youthful adventures on the frontiers of the British Empire, Churchill displayed a remarkable capacity to summon up a scene, to evoke landscapes, to describe towns and villages, and to capture the excitement of military campaigning and armed confrontation. He insisted that his books should be illustrated with drawings, photographs and detailed maps of the battles he witnessed or fought in, and he would later admire T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom for its illustrations and visual effects. From an early age, Churchill was also fascinated by political cartoons, on which he would later write with considerable perceptiveness, and he especially admired the work of David Low. During the 1930s he devised several screenplays for Alexander Korda and his London Film Productions studio (though none was ever made into a film); he befriended Charles Chaplin, whom he met in Hollywood and who later visited Churchill at Chartwell (when it soon became clear that Chaplin's political views were closer to Clare Sheridan's than to his host's) [Fig. 35]; he wrote an essay in 1935 comparing the relative merits of silent and talking films (preferring, perhaps unexpectedly, the former to the latter); and during the Second World War, late-night films at Chequers were his prime form of relaxation (but also a stimulus to his strategic thinking).
For Churchill, the visual was at least as important as the verbal, and in his speeches and his writings the two often converged. Like Macaulay, he was unusually gifted in the art of vivid and arresting 'word-painting'. 'The whole scene', he observed, when describing the Battle of Omdurman in one of his earliest books, 'flickered exactly like a cinematograph picture.' 'I shall try in this and the following letters', he later wrote from South Africa in the Morning Post, 'to paint you a picture of the [Boer] war.' Here, at greater length, is another early example of Churchill's remarkable capacity to evoke a landscape in striking and highly-coloured prose. It is a passage from his only novel, Savrola (1900), and it describes the broad panorama that could be glimpsed by the heroine from the presidential palace in the capital of the fictional republic of Laurania:
The scene which now stretched before her was one of surpassing beauty. The palace stood upon high ground commanding a wide view of the city and the harbour. The sun was low on the horizon, but the walls of the houses still stood out in glaring white. The red and blue tiled roofs were relieved by frequent gardens and squares, whose green and graceful palms soothed and gratified the eye ... Many white-sailed smacks dotted the waters of the Mediterranean Sea, which had already begun to change their blue for the more gorgeous colours of sunset.
Such vivid and richly-pigmented words anticipate the many harbour scenes along the French Riviera and the Mediterranean coast that Churchill would later so fondly depict. Having earlier created such pictures on the page, he would subsequently depict them in oils [Fig. 16].
Churchill did not begin painting until his fortieth year, but his family background and his own talents and temperament provide many clues and pointers as to how and why he made a success of it when he eventually did pick up a paintbrush. Yet as with many aspects of his life and career, Churchill's artistic endeavours need to be set and understood in a broader context. As a soldier in India, he had devoted his leisure hours to playing polo and to reading as many learned books as he could get his hands on. Had he been less focused on horses and belated self-improvement, he might equally have taken up painting, because this was something that many soldiers did. As Churchill had already discovered at Sandhurst, learning to draw, and to appreciate terrain and topography from a military point of view, were essential parts of an officer's training, while the long days of leisure, often spent in unfamiliar and picturesque imperial locations, encouraged many soldiers to take up their sketchbooks or paintbrushes to help while away the time. One such soldier-artist had been the American general and president Ulysses S. Grant, who began painting while a cadet at West Point during the early 1840s; another was General Lord Rawlinson, with whom Churchill would go on a canvas-covering holiday in France in March 1920. During the Second World War, several high-ranking military men on the Allied side were painters, including Generals Eisenhower, Auchinleck and Alexander (and Eisenhower would complete a portrait of Churchill, from photographs, during his presidency). As a soldier-turned-artist, Churchill was neither unusual nor unique: but he was a better artist, and became more famous than any of his contemporary practitioners.
(Continues…)
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Copyright © 2018 David Cannadine.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Preface xiii
Introduction David Cannadine 1
Part 1 Churchill on Art
1 'Not a Very Amiable Topic' (1912) 57
2 'The Naval Greatness of Britain' (1913) 61
3 'Art in All Its Forms' (1919) 65
4 'Art and Politics' (1927) 69
5 'Political Painters' (1932) 73
6 'The Academy Reveals Britain's Brave Gaiety' (1932) 77
7 'This Year's Royal Academy is Exhilarating' (1934) 83
8 'Sea Power' in Art (1937) 89
9 'We Ought Indeed to Cherish the Arts' (1938) 91
10 Painting as a Pastime (1948) 95
11 'Between Tradition and Innovation' (1953) 121
12 'A New Elevation of the Mind' (1954) 123
Part 2 On Churchill's Art
1 'Painting a Picture is Like Fighting a Battle' (1950) Eric Newton 129
2 'Unity, Vitality, Infinity and Repose' (1953) Thomas Bodkin 133
3 'Gay, Brilliantly Coloured Canvasses' (1954) John Rothenstein 139
4 'Long May He Thrive!' (1959) Augustus John 145
5 'A Recognizable Individuality' (1959) Thomas Bodkin 149
6 'A Great Presiding Presence' (1970) John Rothenstein 155
Acknowledgements 167
Index of Names 169