Times Passed

What to do when the work is done?

Painting as a Pastime by Winston S. Churchill

First a couple of pieces in a paper or magazine and then a chapter in his prose collection Thoughts and Adventures, why was this essay of Churchill’s given the de luxe book treatment after the war? Part of it was reputational. Churchill had just won the war and saved the world. Some publishers thought that made him a dream ticket. And he was known to be a painter, although he only did one picture — by his own account — in the whole of the Second World War. This one was in Marrakech, which he later gave to President Roosevelt — and which ended up, via a chain of buyers and sellers, for at least some time in the fragrant hands of Angelina Jolie.

So it was not wartime painting that made Churchill a post-war authority on oils and daubs. It was not, I’d submit, necessarily wartime service. What made Churchill worth publishing at length was, you may not believe it, the substance — the written thing itself. The articles in question, as evidence clerks in police stations are alleged by screenwriters to say.

So, what does the book itself say? Much of it is a meditation on the idea of painting as a retreat, as a haven. Churchill says that past a certain time in life, the shelves of unread books start to depress and upset one. Other hobbies do not give the relaxation that the man of action and the brain worker really needs. He needs something that is physically not exhausting, but which occupies his mind, eye and hand fully. I suppose he could make ceramics. People say they love it. But for Churchill, it must be the paints. It must be the oils, and not the watercolours, too. For the watercolours are not substantial enough to give a man true break from this troubles.

This is where some of Churchill’s most oft-quoted lines on painting come from. The one, for instance, that say when one is lazing about in the afterlife, it might be good to devote the first million or so years to painting. So as to really get to the bottom of the subject. That one. And one or two others about the weary day requiring a respite of another kind — something that can never disappoint one: because who could take issue with the colours for being what they are? And who could ever say that spending time with bright shades lessened his life and his happiness?

Now, much of the latter half of the book is taken up with fine photographic paper reproductions of some of Churchill’s own pictures. They are interesting. Many art critics in Churchill’s own day called his works amateurish and their subject matter postcard-like and uninspiring. He did, as he freely confesses, stick to the bright scenes, the uncomplicated moments when light spilled either flat and hard down onto a tableau of great interest or when it barely shaded some tree-fringed river or pool with the slightest shadow. There is not much obvious complexity in his still-lifes, although they are impressionistic — and not in a bad way.

His Church by Lake Como is pretty but very mannered. Something one might see in a copybook for a talented and advanced child.

One or two pictures give the viewer some pause. One of them is The Goldfish Pool at Chartwell, which I think has interesting shading of light and dark, some quite good reflective effects and a sense, even in a passive scene, of movement, or movement to come. My favourite is of The Loup River, Quebec, which is interestingly proportioned and laid out. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy, Churchill entering it for assessment under an assumed name — although, as with other efforts of his to have his work addressed objectively, one wonders how secure those noms de plume really were.

Churchill was, of course, a writer — he wrote more than survives of Shakespeare. During the lean years of the 1930s, he made his living by his pen (with the help of some ghostwriters on occasion). One of Churchill’s most beautiful pieces of writing is a late short story, an example of very few pieces of fiction of his that have come to light, titled ‘The Dream.’ It begins with the author, late in life’s evening, having been once prime minister, settling down in a studio to copy in oils a portrait of his father, long dead.

We return to our booklet. This is an enjoyable little work and it’s no wonder it sold as well as it has. No wonder it’s still in print in some places. We like to think of our great leaders as having hobbies. Sometimes, like a former prime minister, they pretend to paint, thinking it makes them human. Other times, they like to do battle with canvases for real — and we might prefer to think of that than to think of their doing battle with cabinets.