It was an extraordinary experience, this first visit to [Churchill’s] studio at Chartwell [in February 1949], above all because of the combination in the artist’s temperament of extremes of humbleness and confidence. I learnt to refrain from too positively constructive comment in case he should impulsively put it into effect – he evidently splashed down paint without any inhibition at all, and used whatever aids he judged most appropriate to the work in hand. He preferred to work direct from his subject (and an open-air subject for choice), but he worked on occasion from photographs and even had negatives projected on to sensitized canvasses. The paintings he showed me were energetic, yet they lacked intensity, and he was prone to an excessive use of acid greens. When I observed that the effect of these greens was sharpened by the chilly elephant-grey frames he favoured, he said that I must come to see him in London to discuss the whole problem of framing; but would I there and then choose some paintings for the Summer Exhibition at Burlington House. When I had done so he gave me a puckish look and said, ‘Certain of your choices coincide with those of Sir Alfred.’ Then we talked about prose style. ‘People are sometimes shocked by my use of slang,’ he said, ‘but the shortest words are usually the best – and the simplest constructions.’
Churchill behaved as though I had done him a favour by coming to Chartwell. ‘It was awfully good of you’, he said, ‘to have helped me by giving me so much of your time.’ Then a double whisky was brought in to fortify me on my homeward journey and the arrival of the taxi to take me to the station was announced. ‘There’s plenty of time,’ he said, ‘and there are one or two more of my daubs I’d like to show you.’
When I asked the taxi driver whether we were going to catch the train he said, ‘It’s always the same, so I give visitors a bit of extra notice.’
As I was leaving he asked me whether I would do him the honour of accepting a copy of his Painting as a Pastime. Upon my saying that I should be delighted, he sent his soldier servant to bring one from a place which he designated. On his return with a copy Churchill said irritably, ‘No, not one of those; one of the special copies.’ When it was explained to him that there were no special copies left at Chartwell, he did not offer me that which had been brought, but a few days later a ‘special’ copy, inscribed and beautifully bound, arrived for me by post.
At the Academy Dinner that year Munnings had associated Churchill with a storm of abuse he directed at ‘modern art’ in general and Picasso and Matisse, also Henry Moore, in particular, saying that he and Winston were walking in the street and Winston had said to him, ‘If we met Picasso or Matisse we’d give them a running kick, wouldn’t we?’
Not until the following spring did I pay another visit to Chartwell. In the meanwhile, at the suggestion of one of his friends, I had written a brief appreciation of Churchill as an artist.1 In view of the privileged circumstances in which I had come by my knowledge of his work, it was of course out of the question to publish it without his consent. I accordingly sent him a draft, and shortly afterwards there came an invitation to spend 11 March at Chartwell. The prospect of going over the draft with the subject of it was one that I did not relish at all. I was not sure whether he had read it, but he gave me leave to publish it. ‘I just hoped you’d come here for a talk and once again I’d be most obliged for your advice on what I should send this year to the Academy.’
I at once asked him whether there was any truth in the remarks that Munnings had attributed to him about kicking Picasso and Matisse. ‘Quite untrue’, he said. ‘I was angry. I wrote to Sir Alfred. All quite untrue, and besides, I never walk in the street. Speaking of Presidents of the Royal Academy,’ he asked, ‘what sort of man is Kelly?’ (who had recently succeeded Munnings).
On my previous visit to Chartwell I had been alone with Churchill, but on this occasion there was a family party, Mrs Churchill, their son Randolph, and Mrs Esmond Romilly, besides his friend William Deakin (who had helped him with research in connection with his book on Marlborough). After lunch he took me off to his studio and we went through his pictures. ‘There’s nothing quite recent,’ he said, ‘as I’ve been unable to paint during the election’ (the recently held election at which the Conservatives had been returned to power with himself as Prime Minister).
On the whole he showed little judgement about his own painting (which means no more than that his assessments differed from mine), and he seemed equally surprised by the objects of my praise and censure. There was a landscape we were agreed about in which he had tried, and with success, to capture ‘the emanation of light over water’, but about another canvas, a still-life with a figure of Buddha, which he called ‘Life and Death’, we differed sharply. He was pleased with it and told me that it was his firm intention to send it to the Summer Exhibition, to which I replied that it might win him popular success but it would not add to his reputation as a painter. Nothing I said diminished his satisfaction, and off the picture went to Burlington House.
[On 25 March 1954 I visited Churchill at Downing Street.] It seemed natural to find him in his blue siren-suit and initialled slippers at Chartwell but incongruous at No. 10 – incongruous but none the worse for that. ‘Once again,’ he said, ‘I should be much obliged if you would help me select four works for the Summer Exhibition. They’re putting pressure on me to send more, but I won’t.’ Among the four we selected was an energetic landscape, made recently on the south coast of France. ‘This, and one other, was done in oils over a tempera base,’ he explained, ‘in only two hours – after my stroke.’ Among the works that I particularly admired was one of an orchard; my admiration, Churchill told me, was shared by Gerald Kelly, but he thought little of it himself.
In the meanwhile we were looking through stacks of canvasses and once again we examined one of his two recent landscapes, two big trees blown about by a high wind, and a small tree between them: ‘Look!’ he said, ‘they’re hitting each other properly, aren’t they? And there’s the little neutral, or a child perhaps, his parents are fighting over. I think I’ll call it “The Custody of the Child”.’
Five days later I was again invited to No. 10 Downing Street. The Prime Minister was much preoccupied with the south-of-France landscape that we had discussed on my recent visit. He had carried out the modifications to the sea and the rocks which, under heavy pressure from him, I had suggested, and he had decided, on further consideration, to title it ‘A Family Quarrel’ – ‘just look at the way they are hitting one another,’ he said gleefully, pointing to the boughs, tangling as they were bent by the wind. ‘I might’, he remarked suddenly, ‘hold a one-man exhibition after I retire.’ When I asked him how President Eisenhower painted he said, ‘Ike paints pretty well: how I wish he and I might set up our easels side by side.’
As we looked together at his paintings he sought repeated assurances that those we had selected on my previous visit were fit to go to the Summer Exhibition. He did not follow his usual habit of seeing me to the door, but instead bent over the first of the canvasses to go in order to sign it. ‘This paint’, he zestfully observed, ‘is the blackest black.’
While I was still in bed on the morning of 3 March [1955], Churchill telephoned to ask whether I would come to Chartwell the next day; in order to be able to do so, I postponed until the following night a projected journey to Scotland. Next morning I found him dissatisfied to the point of anxiety by Professor Richardson’s proposals for his representation at the Summer Exhibition that year. I was not surprised, for all five canvasses were trivial little bits of good taste, none of them affording a hint of the energy and closeness of observation that marked his best work. One of the five Professor Richardson had suggested should be trimmed, which further disturbed Churchill. Together we chose instead some more robust and characteristic works, to his manifest relief.
After lunch Churchill suggested we should look at his paintings (with all of which I supposed myself already familiar), but instead of taking me back to the house he led me – past a wall and a cottage which he had largely built himself – to an outbuilding where I had never been before. (For our walk he wore, over his siren-suit, a white overcoat with a light fur collar.) The interior walls of this place were entirely covered with his paintings, to which in our many conversations about his work he had never alluded. Among these were some of his most interesting canvasses, including two pictures of trees seen through drifting mist, made at Roehampton about 1919; also a self-portrait, as well as portraits of Arthur Balfour and his sister, done from photographs. The two mist-veiled trees had a magical touch, to which he himself, however, seemed entirely unresponsive. Later we returned to the house to reconsider the works provisionally selected for the Summer Exhibition. He was eager to show the spirited wind-buffeted trees that I had seen the year before, and now definitely christened ‘The Custody of the Child’2; as well as an ambitious but, to my thinking, unsuccessful ‘Bottlescape’, of 1932.
Ever since I had come to know Churchill’s painting I had been convinced that we should have an example at the Tate. I readily admit that the thought entered my mind that it would be an acquisition fascinating in the way in which, for instance, a landscape by the Elder Pitt would be, but the chief consideration was that if one of the very best could be secured, it would be an acquisition worthy in its own right. This last consideration was crucial, for Churchill was an untaught and often an impetuous artist, whose way of life involved continuous interruption of his painting; only a small proportion of his pictures therefore seemed to me worthy of a place in the national collection. Up to that time he had retained by far the greater part of his production, and his best pictures were still almost all in his own possession. If for any reason this situation were to change, and his pictures to be scattered, it might have become impossible to obtain one of the very best, in which case I would have felt bound to advise against his representation. In May 1955 I submitted these considerations to the Tate Board, and it was agreed that I should explore the possibilities of making a purchase, the Board considering that his resignation as Prime Minister removed an obstacle to his representation. I accordingly wrote about the matter to Churchill, who invited me to Chartwell for 18 July.
My host welcomed me still wearing his dressing-gown, then left me to look through a long rack of his paintings, situated in an upstairs room recently equipped as a studio, the big room where he formerly painted having been converted into a drawing-room. At lunch he seemed at first apathetic and deaf. After a few moments his interest was aroused and he became cheerful and animated. I had told the Trustees that I had somehow formed the impression that he would either decline to allow the Tate to acquire one of his pictures, or else he would offer to present one. The Trustees proved wiser than I, for it quickly became apparent, if matters were to be brought to a conclusion, that it was essential that the Gallery should offer to buy a picture. It was not less apparent that he was unwilling to sell, but that, assured of the Trustees’ willingness to buy, he would be happy to present one, provided that he was assured that extraneous considerations had no part in our interest in his work. I explained that while I believed he was aware of my own long-standing admiration, the Trustees had been naturally sensitive about making an approach to the Prime Minister to whom several of them owed their appointments. At this he grinned broadly and said, ‘So you think it’s all right, do you, now that I’ve been kicked out? Not’, he continued in a grimmer, almost challenging tone, ‘that they could have forced me to go before I wanted to.’ When asked whether there were not great compensations in freedom from public responsibilities that left little time for private pursuits, he gave a doubtful grunt.
On the morning of the following Thursday, 21 July, I was deep in the complex preparations for the afternoon’s Board Meeting when [Churchill] telephoned, asking me to go to see him as soon as possible at his London house, 28 Hyde Park Gate. I found him in bed smoking an immense cigar; a box containing others stood on his bedside table. He had been giving much thought, he said, to the selection of his paintings for consideration by the Tate and he asked me to tell the Board of his own strong preference for ‘The Loup River, Alpes Maritimes’. When I remarked on the absence of ‘The Orchard’, which he had promised on Monday that the Board should at least ‘see’ – though it was understood it was not to be his sole work in the Gallery – he said emphatically, ‘I can’t let that be seen in any circumstances.’ It was most singular, this aversion to one of his most beautiful pictures. The reason for his change of intention may not have been aesthetic: I gathered that Gerald Kelly had tried to secure it for the Dulwich Gallery, but that Churchill had refused to part with it; and he possibly felt that to let it go to the Tate might have offended Kelly. ‘I’ll sign whichever picture your Trustees accept. And I should be most obliged if you would let me know their decision by telephone this evening.’
After the Board Meeting I telephoned to tell him that ‘The Loup River’ had been accepted, and with the utmost pleasure. This painting, in my opinion one of his best, was made in 1930, the site lying about 500 yards from where the main Cagnes-to-Grasse road crosses the river, and it exemplifies his unusual perception of light effects over water.
On my return to London on 23 February 1956, from a visit to the United States, I found an urgent message from Churchill asking me to go down to Chartwell the very next morning. Sir Winston seemed indifferent and infirm, but as on other occasions his spirits revived over lunch, and before it was half through he was alert and genial as ever. Always retentive of matters that had annoyed him, he referred, although without mentioning Munnings by name, to his association of himself with abuse of Picasso and Matisse, and as though by way of an additional repudiation he described how on a recent visit to France he had been studying books on Cézanne, Van Gogh and certain of their contemporaries and had even made some copies of illustrations of paintings by Cézanne.
During his last years I had the privilege of Churchill’s company less frequently, partly, I believe, because for one reason or another he had not been able, in retirement, to realize his ambition of giving more time to painting. Almost invariably after the Academy Dinner he sent to ask me to accompany him round a part of the exhibition. In the course of such a perambulation in 1956, when Munnings had embarrassed his fellow Academicians by releasing to the press a statement that this was the worst Academy ever, dominated by ‘young brutes’, and that he declined to attend the dinner, Churchill told me that he ‘sharply disapproved’, also of my inclusion in what Munnings called a ‘satiric’ picture – a harmless but silly caricatural conversation piece which he showed that year.
In the course of another such perambulation after the dinner the following year, he asked me abruptly, ‘Are the President and Council bound to accept any work submitted by an RA?’ I told him that I understood that they rarely exercised their right of exclusion. Then he began to speak about his portrait by Ruskin Spear hanging in the exhibition, which he obviously disliked, and when somebody came up to talk to him he evidently still had much to say about it; later on I saw him refuse to shake hands with Spear.
I count this intermittent yet years-long association with Churchill as one of the great privileges life has accorded me. It was in one respect at least a singular relationship, in that in spite of his extraordinary candour and the warmth of his friendliness I do not believe that I ever came to know him very much better. His mannerisms, his way of life, as well as certain experiences that inflicted lasting wounds, certain affections and aversions, I certainly came to know, but about the deeper operations of his mind I understand little more than I did at the end of that first day at Chartwell in 1949. Of one of his attributes I would like to make particular mention: his extraordinary and unvarying consideration and courtesy.
On 24 January 1965 the news that Churchill had died shortly after eight in the morning was broadcast at nine. We listened to this and to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony that followed it. I found tears in my eyes. We knew how very ill he was; that his memory had failed and death was merciful. A few Sundays earlier Cyril Connolly had written of T. S. Eliot, who died on 4 January, that he had liked the feeling that he was around. I felt that about Churchill and so, I imagine, did all Britain. A great presiding presence was no longer there.
The funeral took place six days afterwards. Today so much of the finest art, however widely appreciated, is of a private character, addressed to a comprehending few. Churchill’s funeral, on the contrary, was a superbly contrived public work of art, dignified, splendid, tender, ingenious: the sudden unexpected singing in St. Paul’s of ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’; the bowing cranes on the South Bank of the Thames as the boat carrying the body passed by. By evening he was lying not many miles away in Oxfordshire earth.