May 25, 2010

Comment by the Churchill Centre: Recently on BBC Radio 4, antiquarian book dealer Rick Gekoski told the story of the Sutherland portrait of Churchill, commissioned as a triubte on WSC’s 80th birthday in 1954. Gekoski said it was destroyed after WSC death by his wife because she hated it so much. Photographs taken before its demise show the Prime Minister hunched with age and dark in mood. A detailed study by the artist for the destroyed painting still hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.

Gekoski asked if the rights of an owner override those of the public, and if the Churchills had the moral right to destroy it. What were Sutherland’s personal feelings toward Churchill? It looks like the sort of painting you’d do of someone you didn’t like very well.

This is an old story, remarked as early as Finest Hour 4 back in 1969. If private property still has any meaning, Lady Churchill was within her rights to do as she wished. FH has vowed never to run that portrait-it’s easily Googled, after all. An authoritative account is in Mary Soames, Churchill: His Life as a Painter (London: Collins, 1990, 193-95). For an email transcript, email the Finest Hour editor.

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As to Sutherland’s feeling toward WSC, from Lord Moran, Churchill: The Struggle for Survival (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966) 659-60:

A lot of his time since the end of the war had been spent in arranging and editing the part he will play in history, and it has been rather a shock to him that his ideas and those of Graham Sutherland seem so far apart. “Filthy,” he spluttered. “I think it is malignant.”

Was Winston fair to the artist? Sutherland’s intentions, at any rate, seem to have been unexceptionable. The trouble was not that he admired the P.M. too little, but rather that he worshipped him too blindly. Graham Sutherland was thinking of the Churchill who had stopped the enemy and saved England, and the manner in which, without a word of

guidance, Mr. Churchill took up a pose on the dais convinced the painter that he was on the right tack. “I wanted,” he said, “to paint him with a kind of four-square look, to picture Churchill as a rock.”

One day at Chartwell-it was either the first or second sitting-Sutherland said to me: “There are so many Churchills. I have to find the real one.”

When I learnt that he intended to paint a lion at bay I tried to sound a warning note. “Don’t forget,” I said, “that Winston is always acting, try to see him when he has got the grease-paint off his face.” But the artist paid no heed; he painted the P.M. as he pictured him in his own favourite part. And why should Winston complain, for surely it was he who created the role? All that Graham Sutherland did was to accept the legend for the truth.

Listen to the BBC4 Programme here.

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