‘To know a painter,’ said Delacroix after a visit to Corot, ‘you must see him in his studio.’ It was on 21 February 1949 that I was first accorded the privilege of thus visiting Sir Winston Churchill. When I arrived at Chartwell no car stood in front of the house, and from the hall no sound was to be heard. Upon a table reposed an object familiar from innumerable photographs: a wide-brimmed, grey painting hat. I was contemplating this celebrated object with respect, as though it were the hat of a king sent to represent him on some ceremonial occasion, when I heard soft padding steps approach, and presently, dressed in his sky-blue siren-suit and shod in soft black slippers on which his initials were worked in gold, there appeared my host benignly welcoming.
Before lunch we visited his studio, a long, narrow room brightly lit by high windows along two walls. Upon a long, narrow table standing lengthwise to the room were ranged tidy rows of paint tubes; beside it was the great terrestrial globe, a present, he told me, from the American army. But for this globe, there was throughout the whole house a conspicuous absence of any display of trophies, historic battle orders and the like. The suggestion was made some years ago that Chartwell should one day be preserved as a museum. If it were left in its present state there would be little to remind the visitor of the fabulous career of its former owner, and filled with trophies it would give a false impression of his manner of living.
During our first visit to his studio Churchill told me that he would be grateful for any criticism of his painting I might care to make. ‘Speak, I pray, with absolute frankness,’ he urged as we went to lunch. As soon as we sat down he began to speak of Sickert: ‘He came to stay here and in a fortnight he imparted to me all his considered wisdom about painting. He had a room specially darkened to work in, but I wasn’t an apt pupil, for I rejoice in the highest lights and the brightest colours.’ He spoke with appreciation of Sickert’s knowledge of music halls, and he sang a nineteenth-century ballad he had learnt from him; and he sang it from beginning to end. ‘I think the person who taught me most about painting was William Nicholson. I noticed you looking, I thought with admiration, at the drawings upstairs he made of my beloved cat.’ During lunch his most memorable remark did not concern painters or painting. Upon his inquiring why I declined his offer of a cigar, I replied that every man should possess one virtue; the only one I could certainly claim was that I did not smoke: to which he instantly rejoined, ‘There is no such thing as a negative virtue. If I have been of any service to my fellow men, it has never been by self-repression, but always by self-expression.’ Back in the studio, fortified by a bottle of champagne, his invitation to give my opinion of his work without reserve seemed to me less alarming. In the course of the afternoon we must have looked at every one of the numerous paintings in the studio and the few that hung in various other parts of the house.
Churchill was so genial and so exhilarating a companion that before I had been with him long the notion of speaking with absolute frankness seemed as natural as it had earlier seemed temerarious. My first detailed criticism of one of his paintings had an unexpected, indeed a startling, result. About one of his landscapes – a wood on the margin of a lake – I offered the opinion that the shore was far too shallow, too lightly modelled and far too pale in tone to support the weight of the heavy trees with their dense, dark foliage, so that, instead of growing up out of the earth, they weighed it down. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I can put that right at once; it would take less than a quarter of an hour,’ and he began to look out the appropriate brushes and colours.
‘But this painting, surely,’ I said, ‘must be among your earliest?’
‘I did it about twenty years ago,’ he conceded.
‘Well then,’ I protested, ‘surely it’s impossible for you to recapture the mood in which you painted it, or indeed your whole outlook of those days?’
‘You really are convinced of that,’ he grumbled, abandoning the notion of repainting with evident reluctance. This was the first of several occasions when I had to persuade him to desist from repainting an early work in consequence of some criticism of mine. ‘If it weren’t for painting,’ Sir Winston said as we left the studio, ‘I couldn’t live; I couldn’t bear the strain of things.’
The key to the understanding of Churchill’s own painting is to be found, I believe, in a few sentences in his essay, Painting as a Pastime. These explain the seeming contradiction between the known personality and experience of the painter, and the character of the work; between the man profoundly and consistently preoccupied with the affairs of men, above all in their political and military aspects, and the small landscapes in which there is nowhere any intimation of struggle or tragedy, and in which, indeed, man scarcely figures at all. To many his little, gay, brilliantly coloured canvasses seem to bear no relation to their creator, but such people make insufficient allowance for the difficulties of the art of painting. Had the fairies stuck a paint brush into his hand instead of a pen into one and a sword into the other, had he learnt while still a boy to draw and to paint, had he dedicated an entire laborious lifetime to the tempering of his powers, and to the disciplining of his visual imagination, these powers would have been immeasurably greater.Then he would have been equipped to express a large part of himself, instead of a few facets. He would have painted big pictures (it is significant that in his essay he calls pictures ‘great’ when the context shows that he means ‘big’). There can be little doubt that he would have represented human beings and their affairs. In fact I recall his exclaiming, on an earlier occasion when we were looking at ‘Napoleon on the Bellerophon’, ‘I don’t see why artists today regard great themes as less legitimate than trivial ones.’ Fully equipped, he would have been what in the age of Reynolds was called a ‘history’ painter. His circumstances were in fact quite different. He was a late starter; he had neither the systematic training nor the leisure necessary to develop his talents to the full. He does not undertake heroic themes, large organizations of figures in action – many figures, perhaps, in vigorous action – he does not undertake them because they demand what the circumstances of his public life have denied him: the most expert knowledge and a long daily experience of painting.
Sir Winston’s consistent awareness of his limitations is implicit in the sentences which give the key to his work:
The painter must choose between a rapid impression, fresh and warm and living, but probably deserving only of a short life, and the cold, profound, intense effort of memory, knowledge and will-power, prolonged perhaps for weeks, from which a masterpiece can alone result. It is much better not to fret too much about the latter. Leave to the masters of art trained by a lifetime of devotion the wonderful process of picture-building and picture-creation. Go out into the sunlight and be happy with what you see.
This awareness led him to cultivate the possibilities open to him with the utmost assiduity and resource. He is therefore, able to do much more than enjoy himself in the sunlight. The skilful choice of subjects within his range to which he can respond ardently enables him to paint pictures that convey and enhance delight and are distinguished by their painterly qualities; pictures, too, that have an intimate and direct relation to his outlook on life. In these there comes surging irrepressibly up his sheer joy in the simple beauties of nature: water, still, bubbling, or agitated by wind; snow immaculate and crisp; trees, dark with the density of their foliage or dappled by sunlight; fresh flowers; distant mountains, and, above all, sunlight at its fiercest. The high peaks of his achievement, in my opinion, are ‘The Goldfish Pool at Chartwell’ (1948), ‘The Loup River Québec’ (1947), ‘Chartwell under Snow’ (1947) and ‘Cannes Harbour, Evening’ (1923). These express, with insight and candour, his exultant enjoyment of living. ‘I look forward,’ he said, ‘to a leisure hour with pleasurable agitation: it’s so difficult to choose between writing, reading, painting, bricklaying, and three or four other things I want to do.’
It is relevant, in view of a deliberate attempt to associate the illustrious name of Sir Winston with vulgar attacks upon Picasso, Matisse and other contemporary painters outside the academic fold, to point out that not only does he himself belong to what is likely to be the last phase of Impressionism, but that the expressive violence of the colour in his later pictures shows that he has looked with sympathy at Post-Impressionism as well. The evidence of his painting is reinforced by that of his written tribute to his masters. ‘But surely,’ he wrote in his essay,
we owe a debt to those who have so wonderfully vivified, brightened and illuminated modern landscape painting. Have not Manet and Monet, Cézanne and Matisse, rendered to painting something of the same service which Keats and Shelley gave to poetry after the solemn and ceremonious perfections of the eighteenth century? They have brought back to the pictorial art a new draught of joie de vivre; and the beauty of their work is instinct with gaiety, and floats in sparkling air.