Beware the politician who claims to be “100% committed” to their constituency, or their country, said Laura Freeman in The Times. “There is much to be said for a hobby and hinterland.”
In a photograph in the first room of this exhibition, Winston Churchill stands at his easel, a paintbrush in his hand, a cigar in his mouth. “Over 50 years, in and out of office, and in and out of black-dog glooms, Churchill produced more than 500 paintings. About 50 of them are gathered here.” None are of any great artistic merit.
But the show conveys the sense of a man who was unflagging in his efforts and eager to learn (he sought advice from the likes of John Lavery and William Nicholson) – and who loved painting, the whole business of it: “the colours, the carrying bag for canvases, the sending off of telegrams to request a new tube of cadmium rose, the doing of daub after daub in the hope that the next one might be a keeper”.
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And wherever he went, he kept an eye out for what he called a “paintatious” spot. “If it weren’t for painting,” he once said, “I couldn’t live; I couldn’t bear the strain of things.” As you walk through this charming, informative exhibition, “you share his pleasure and release”.
Churchill “came to painting late”, said Nick Curtis in The Independent. He was 40 years old, and at a very low ebb following the catastrophic failure of the Gallipoli campaign, when he took up the hobby, in 1915, and became hooked. He dismissed his efforts as “daubs”, and he repeatedly stressed that, for him, painting was therapy, a refuge from the strains of his work. But when, in an effort to get an honest appraisal of his talent, he submitted paintings under an assumed name to the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition, they were praised by the committee and accepted.
Their charm, though, lies in their amateurishness, said Olivia McEwan in The Guardian. Churchill wasn’t trying to impress anyone; nor was he using art to make a point (though the cannon pointing across the Channel in “The Beach at Walmer”, from 1938, is surely a metaphor). He was a Sunday painter, who showed in his Mediterranean landscapes (probably his best works) a love for “dazzlingly contrasting colours”.
The exhibition is interesting because of who Churchill was: it records where he went, what he saw. You would not mistake him for a major artist, and perhaps not even a minor one.
No, you would not, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. Many of his canvases look like “inexpert imitations” of post-Impressionist paintings he admired. I was surprised, though, to find that, overall, he was a pretty decent painter. A few of his oils don’t work (and the stick figures in the backgrounds of some are risible), but they almost all convey “his infectious passion for the art form”, and one or two really come together. Look out for the view, from about 1924, of his beloved Chartwell in the snow. It is “delicious”.
The Wallace Collection, London W1. Until 29 November
