How painting helped Winston Churchill lead the fight against fascism

He stares beadily out of the canvas, the bald pate more lushly fringed with sandy hair and the body more trim than in later life, but the pugnacious, bulldog set of the jaw is unmistakable: Winston Churchill, Britain’s great wartime leader and statesman, immortalising himself in the act of painting in a rare self-portrait from 1915.

This picture stands in the first room of a new exhibition at the Wallace Collection focusing on the artistic practice that Churchill used as a balm and a diversion while in and out of office. And arguably, as a tool of soft power, gifting pictures to wartime allies and political friends. The show presents Churchill as the polymath – politician, writer, artist – that a later prime minister, Boris Johnson, so consciously tried to emulate.

Churchill came to painting late, aged 40 in 1915, at the encouragement of his sister-in-law, while in political exile following the failure of the Gallipoli campaign in the First World War. Immediately energised, he was instructed and encouraged to paint en plein air by his friend and portraitist Sir John Lavery. Re-enlisting as a lieutenant colonel in the Royal Scots Fusiliers in 1916, he painted on the Belgian battlefield at Ploegsteert before returning to the UK and mainstream political life.

Early interiors and still lives at his birthplace, Blenheim Palace, and landscapes at friends’ houses and his own country home, Chartwell, purchased in 1922, give way to more vivid and bold paintings from Italy, France and Morocco. After Lavery, Churchill sought further guidance from William Nicholson and Walter Sickert, including instruction in the use of a projector to throw an image onto a canvas.

He wrote about the pleasures and challenges of painting in essays in 1921 and 1922, collected as the book Painting as a Pastime in 1948. Yet he regarded his works as “daubs” and submitted them pseudonymously to a commercial gallery in Paris in 1921, and at the Royal Academy in 1947.

The Tower of the Koutoubia Mosque, given pride of place in the show, was the only painting he made during his first stint as prime minister during the Second World War. It was created for and gifted to US president Franklin D Roosevelt to commemorate the pivotal Casablanca conference, after which Churchill had insisted his polio-crippled ally be carried to a villa roof to see the view of Marrakesh. The painting was later owned by Angelina Jolie and sold by her at Christie’s in 2021 for £8.28m, a record for a Churchill artwork.

“I thought there was a story there, and a story worth telling,” says Xavier Bray, director of the Wallace Collection and co-curator of the exhibition with Lucy Davis. He conceived the show during a visit to Churchill’s studio at Chartwell during Covid, when he was “completely bowled over by the colours, compositions, the places he visited”. Works have been drawn from Chartwell, private owners and the Eisenhower Presidential Library.

Churchill’s connections to the Wallace Collection are tenuous at best: Bray admits that “the place that really should do a show on him is the Royal Academy”, where he was inducted (the first amateur so honoured) in 1948, and which mounted a retrospective of his works in 1959. But having selected 60 of the around 600 works Churchill is known to have painted, Bray says that “he holds up as an artist very well. I admit, I’ve shown him at his best. I mean, the bad ones are bad, but interestingly bad…”

For the art dealer, gallery owner, writer and broadcaster Philip Mould, the exhibition represents a much-needed overview of a figure who has been seen as “more of a sort of celebrity amateur than a serious artist”. As “one of the most famous people in the world from a very young age, he could draw people [like Lavery and Nicholson] into his circle” and learn from them, and the show charts an autodidact’s avid progress.

Bray adds: “He’s conservative but he loves the post-Impressionists, knows about Cezanne, owns a Monet. But he’s not a modern: Picasso is not someone he thought was a great artist.” Conversely, Picasso, on seeing the painting La Dragonnière (also included in the exhibition) in 1948, opined that Churchill would “have no trouble making a living” as an artist had he not been otherwise occupied saving Europe from fascism.

Is it possible to separate Churchill’s ability from his status as a world figure? “Celebrity of the individual is often a part of the way artists are valued,” says Mould, “and in the past 50 years art has changed so radically that people are not necessarily required to judge painters and painting on technical proficiency. People want a piece of the individual analogous to the even longer tradition of owning a sacred relic.”

He adds that Churchill used art as a tool to alleviate the pressures of leadership and his own tendency to depression, “to wipe the mental screen, to reboot, to recalibrate. It’s a very important message to say that Winston Churchill used art as therapy. I would go further still and say that without him having the benefits that art gave him, the Nazi peril may well have prevailed.”

For Bray, Churchill was also an enthusiast who wanted others to share the delight he took in the craft of painting, to “allow people to follow their bliss”. By presenting himself as a modest amateur, much as he spoke of his skills in bricklaying, “he made himself humble, approachable, one of us”.

When out of office from 1945, before he was re-elected prime minister in 1951, “there was almost a propaganda campaign about him as a painter”, Bray adds. He suggests Churchill was underlining that he had brought about a peace in which the arts could flourish, while also telling himself and the public he “wasn’t just a retired politician”. (In Mel Brooks’s The Producers, the hysterical Nazi Franz Liebkind dismisses Churchill in relation to his Fuhrer: “Hitler, there was a painter. He could paint an entire apartment in one afternoon! Two coats!”)

The Wallace exhibition certainly makes the case for Churchill as a gifted “dilettante”, as EH Gombrich described him. And for politicians to have, and celebrate, a cultural hinterland. Both Eisenhower and George W Bush were inspired to paint by Churchill. Tony Blair and Keir Starmer seem almost embarrassed by their interest in music.

Boris Johnson’s friends talk up his passion for painting, learnt from his artist mother: critics suggest he posed at an easel in 2021 specifically to evoke comparisons with Churchill and talked to the BBC in 2019 about painting buses on wine boxes to thwart internet searches about the infamous “Brexit promise” bus. Will we ever see a major gallery exhibition of his artworks, or any other PM’s? I doubt it.

Winston Churchill: The Painter is showing at the Wallace Collection from 23 May to 29 November