To appraise Sir Winston Churchill’s abilities as an artist-painter, and to assess accurately the value, aesthetic or monetary, of his pictures, is a task which none of his contemporaries can set about hopefully. The critic must be prejudiced, one way or another, by the knowledge that the man who produced these pictures has amply proved himself to be the possessor of genius as a statesman, as a historian and as an orator. He is, very probably, the most remarkable Englishman who has ever lived, and likely to remain for ages the most admired of Englishmen in the eyes of other races. If he chooses to spend much of his scanty leisure in painting, surely it must be assumed that he is intelligent enough to know that such time is well spent, and that he would have sufficient power of self-criticism to refrain from preserving with care, and some pride, the results of his efforts should these prove to be of negligible worth.
It is all very well to ask the critic: what would you think of his pictures if you came suddenly upon a large number of them, unsigned and untitled, for the first time in a public exhibition? A competent critic would, beyond all shadow of doubt, reply at least that he would be much impressed by them and would want to see that exhibition again, fortified by some outside knowledge of the painter’s personality and career. Good work in any art provokes curiosity about its author. To assert that knowledge of an artist’s life is irrelevant to the judgment of his art is an affectation, often indulged, but one which runs counter to experience. The more we know about his antecedents, his environment, his ambitions, his fortunes, his family and his physical and intellectual equipment, the more likely we are to understand whatever he may be trying to say to us in the language of his art, be that a language made of words, of sounds, or of visual images. That is the fundamental reason why we welcome with enthusiasm all new information that may be discovered about the lives and personalities of the great artists of the past, and use it to throw light on their achievements.
Knowing a great deal about Sir Winston Churchill as a man, we expect to find his salient qualities reflected in his painting. We are not disappointed in this expectation. A striking characteristic of his pictures is their quite extraordinary decisiveness. Each is a clear and forcible pronouncement. He does not niggle nor retouch. His paint is laid once and for all with no apparent hesitation or afterthought. It is never fumbled or woolly in texture. Spaces are filled with obvious speed. His colours are bright, clean and well harmonized. His drawing makes factual statements, though these may not always be quite accurate in detail. His knowledge of perspective, for example, is far from being that of a well-trained and practised professional artist. Sometimes the façade of a building, standing at an angle to the horizon, will seem to spread open rather than contract as it recedes from the eye of the beholder. Reflections shown in water will not always chime in correct alignment with the objects reflected. But were he more scientific, it is likely that he would lose some of the spontaneity which is one of his most potent attractions. His inaccuracies are never of substantial importance.
His ability to devise a good composition might well be envied by many a successful modern professional. He does not try to say two or more things at the same time. Each of his pictures is the presentation of a distinct theme: a tower, a village, a church, a lake, a harbour, a range of mountains, a pool, a group of palm trees, an English grove, a Grecian temple. The dominant motive is never obscured by irrelevancies. The spectator’s eye is never tempted to wander outside the confines of the frame. This power to design well is one which may be developed by attention to rules and formulae. But in his case there seems to be an inherent natural ability in action, without much planning or preoccupation, which brings about results that wear a delightful air of improvisation.
The range of subjects that appeal to him is also very remarkable; and he is never repetitive. When he brings off a convincing effect he shows no desire to continue in the same strain; and his next picture is apt to be concerned with some quite different problem. He is primarily interested in landscape, but shows no desire to subject natural appearances to romantic or dramatic conventions. He does not attempt to deal with storms, night-scenes or, even, lurid sunsets. Light and peace, those qualities which all wise men most value in life, are indubitably those which chiefly distinguish the scenes that he prefers to paint.
‘Escapism’ is a word that has sometimes been used to describe Sir Winston’s attitude to pictorial art. It is an ugly word, often carrying a sense of denigration. Yet the function of art, alike for those who produce it as for those who enjoy it, is primarily to release the human spirit from the undue pressure of mundane affairs, or to shield it from the more sordid aspects of reality. The Greeks and the Florentines, each in their Golden Age, lived amid lovely surroundings and knew nothing of the grim horrors of total war or mass manufacture. Their art was, therefore, principally centred on the human body portrayed in postures carefully calculated to enhance mankind’s normal ideals of dignity and power. The vast population of modern Europe and America must, for the most part, live in densely overcrowded cities, dark with smoke and throbbing with ceaseless noise. They long for the quiet of green fields and clean skies; and so the art of the landscape painter is the one which best fulfils their spiritual need. It was a branch of art that only existed precariously and in a subsidiary way a few centuries ago. Now it has outgrown all the others. Landscape predominates in every contemporary exhibition of pictures.
Sir Winston cannot avoid being a man of his period. His long working life has been largely spent under the urgent pressure of public business and in contact with innumerable people. Naturally when he first took seriously to oil painting, after he had passed his fortieth year, it was to landscape that he looked for inspiration.
He himself has told the story of his beginnings in an article entitled ‘Painting as a Pastime’, which appeared in the Strand magazine and was reprinted soon afterwards in his book Thoughts and Adventures, published in 1932. That article, amplified, forms a large part of the persuasive lively book, also entitled Painting as a Pastime, which came out in 1948 and has been selling steadily ever since. Its call to Everyman to paint for himself, reinforced by good coloured reproductions from sixteen well selected pictures by its author, must have powerfully stimulated the sale of artists’ materials during the past five of his work. Truth is the daughter of Time. At the moment all that can be safely conjectured is that the association value preponderates. The painter himself is singularly modest in speaking persistently of his painting as a mere pastime. He goes too far towards suggesting that there is a great gulf fixed between what he calls ‘the real artist’, highly trained, and the man who paints for pleasure, largely by rule of thumb, when he can find time to do so amid more pressing pursuits. There have been masters of the first rank who painted as instinctively as a bird sings and needed little tuition. Corot was one of these.
Sir Winston Churchill himself is another instinctive painter, though one who is always searching for fresh ways and means to produce the desired results. Madame Balsan has described him painting the moat at her country house in France. He decided that the still water did not contribute to the effect he sought. So a boat was moored to the bank in order that an oarsman therein might churn up ripples on its surface. Finally, a photographer was called in to record their pattern for future reference. Photographs have also been used as aids to the drawing and placing of some of the rare figures in Sir Winston’s landscapes. The purist may object to this, though Degas is known to have learned much from photographs, and Sickert relied on them with increasing frequency throughout his life, and never hesitated to acknowledge his debt.
Chesterton, on hearing someone described as a ‘minor poet’, took hot exception to the term, insisting that the significant word was ‘poet’, and that the word ‘minor’ was an uncalled-for disparagement. By analogy Sir Winston as a painter should be described comprehensively as an artist. No one, least of all himself, wishes to describe him as a Master. In a wise, learned and, unfortunately, half-forgotten book, The Science of Picture-Making, the late Sir Charles Holmes postulated that all pictures should possess the qualities of unity, vitality, infinity and repose. All these, in varying degrees, seem to be present in Sir Winston’s pictures. Another quality which, to my mind, should characterize a true work of art is inexhaustibility. The melody, the poem, or the picture should exist as a fountain that flows always or a fire that never dies, to which a man may return hopefully whenever he needs refreshment or enlightenment. It is precisely that strange quality which transmutes verses into poems, and paintings into pictures. Sir Winston’s paintings often possess it. As I write, there comes to my mind a tall canvas on which he has shown a long perspective of the golden walls of the city of Marrakesh soaked in tropical sunlight, and sentinelled by a rank of slender, green-crested palm trees. In the lower left-hand corner three erect, dark, motionless figures are standing in a mysterious group. It is one of those many pictures of his which, I think, any wise man would wish to contemplate again and again.