An honest critic coming to appraise the 61 pictures by Sir Winston Churchill now on view at Burlington House should try to put out of mind all the other multifarious achievements of their painter, and ask himself if the Royal Academy, when creating Sir Winston an Honorary Academician Extraordinary, did so primarily as a tribute to his artistic prowess. The answer must be that his great gifts for the practice of pictorial art would not seem by themselves alone to have justified that decision. The distinction is a unique one; and there are many of his colleagues among the Academicians who paint landscapes with greater skill and more intense emotion.
Yet it would be a great mistake to regard Sir Winston’s pictures as works which fail to reach a high professional standard. Judged by any fair test, he has to be regarded as a serious and accomplished painter who has won, on his merits, the right to take a place among the ranks of his professional colleagues. He has always been scrupulously anxious to avoid incurring the charge that partiality has been exercised in his favour. The first two pictures which he submitted to the Selection Committee of the Academy were sent forward in 1949 under the pseudonym David Winter; and they were accepted and hung before his real identity was divulged. One of them, ‘The River Loup’, now represents him in the Tate Gallery and is lent thence to Burlington House. Since then Sir Winston has exhibited forty three paintings to the annual Summer Exhibitions. Most of these were painted many years previous to their first public appearance, for he ceased to paint during the war years. The earliest goes back to 1916. Even so, he was a late starter, for he was then forty two years of age. But he got quickly away, and a little painting, ‘Headquarters, Lawrence Farm, Plug Street’, which was done while he served as a fighting solder in the First World War, shows that he had already acquired a sound technical competence. It is the first picture which the visitor sees when he enters the exhibition. Sir Winston still practises his art, and brought back four large canvasses from his recent holiday. Having been privileged to see his collection at Chartwell, I should judge that it amounts to at least five hundred items. That is a total which comes to more than the average professional’s output during a full working life.
Though Sir Winston eagerly sought advice from other artists in the early years of his practice, he was never an imitator of any other man’s style; and a recognizable individuality permeates this whole exhibition. A faint suggestion of an admiration for Monet may appear in the ‘Rocks near Cannes’ or a reminiscence of Sir William Nicholson’s painterly ease in the ‘Black Swans at Chartwell’, yet there is nothing imitative or directly derivative in any of these sixty one canvasses. ‘Winter Sunshine, Chartwell’, painted so far back as 1924, is an astonishingly individual thing. Its painter entered it anonymously for a competition for works by amateur painters to be judged by Sir Kenneth Clark, Sir Joseph Duveen and Sir Oswald Birley who, while wondering if it might not be a professional work, agreed to award it the first prize. It was subsequently signed with a full signature, a distinction which it shares with the fine landscape ‘Cork Trees near Mimizan’ painted in the same year. As a rule, Sir Winston does not sign his pictures, though a few of them for which he seemingly has a special preference bear the initials W.S.C.
The core of this exhibition consists of the thirty five pictures which have recently returned from a tour of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States of America. To these have been added twenty six, mostly from the artist’s studio. So, if he has kept his own countrymen to the last, he has made up for this by giving them more to look at. As he is inclined to be a little diffident about the merits of his painting, it may well be that he wished his work to be tried out abroad, before putting it on view at home. Its display overseas brought about the breaking of records for attendance in many galleries, and it should have a similar result in London.
The subject matter of Sir Winston’s chief predilection as a painter is landscape. He has painted no portraits [sic]; and few of the landscapes contain figures, though ‘Le Beguinage, Bruges’, done in 1948, shows how well he can draw and place figures in a landscape setting when he chooses to do so. This is lent by Miss Hamblin, one of the very few private persons privileged to possess a picture by him. The Duke of Sutherland lends a very early one of ‘Loch Choire’, Lady Birley, ‘Les Zoraides, Cap Martin’, showing the reflection of a house in a pool, and his publisher, Mr Emery Reves, a dashing group of three trees on a cliff, painted quite recently and humorously entitled ‘Custody of the Child’. For the rest, Sir Winston prefers to be his own collector; though Lady Churchill lends three notable tributes of his affection: ‘Cork Trees near Mimizan’, ‘Flowers’, a crystal vase of brilliant blooms, and ‘Bottlescape’, the still-life of bottles, wine-glasses and cigar-boxes which was painted in 1932 and excited much admiration for its dashing virtuosity when it appeared in 1955 at the Annual Summer Exhibition of the Academy. The cover of the well illustrated guide-catalogue of the show is adorned with a good colour-reproduction of ‘Magnolia’ lent by his daughter Mary, Mrs Christopher Soames, who is also the fortunate possessor of ‘Tapestries at Blenheim’, one of his few interiors, often reproduced and said to rank among his favourites.
The collection is well arranged in the North and South Rooms of the Dipio Gallery. Each picture is labelled with its title and the approximate date of its execution. Their order is not chronological. The general effect is high in tone and bright in colour. But there is nothing to suggest that Sir Winston’s style can be segregated into periods. It came to sudden maturity and shows neither advance nor regression with the passing of the years. If some pictures seem more impressive than others, that is probably because he was able to give more time to them. Thus the ‘Torcello’, done in 1949, and the ‘Venice’, done in 1951, look a little too cursory and inchoate. He seems to have been able to spend longer time on such magisterial compositions as ‘River Scene, France’, which curiously is one of the few not reproduced in the catalogue, and the ‘Valley of the Ourika and the Atlas Mountains’.
Were I to be given my choice of them all I think I should opt for the ‘Black Swans at Chartwell’, obviously a theme after its painter’s heart, ingeniously designed and lovely in colour. All else being equal, the pictures that will surely give people most pleasure are those which have close personal associations with the great man: ‘Snow at Chartwell’, ‘The Goldfish Pool’, where he has so often come to throw grain to its glittering denizens in his hour of relaxation, or ‘Chartwell Kitchen Garden’, bounded by the brick wall that he built with his own capable hands in the middle of the fair countryside of Kent.