March 24, 2017

Paintings by Churchill are still being discovered. In 2012, a previously unknown oil entitled ‘Still Life with Orchids’ materialised, having been in the Sandys family ever since Churchill presented it to Margot Sandys, the young wife of his daughter’s father-in-law. It was put up for sale with an estimated selling price of £750,000.

Churchill’s paintings were reproduced during his lifetime in various publications and many of these originals have yet to be traced (these include those that accompanied his articles in the Strand Magazine in 1921, 1922 and 1946, in the Illustrated London News of 1954 and, most surprisingly perhaps, those that illustrated the catalogue of his Royal Academy Exhibition in 1959).

And the whereabouts of those six paintings apparently sold in Paris following his first exhibition, at the Galerie Druet in Paris in 1921, remain unknown. After the Second World War, Churchill gave two paintings of the Pyramids near Cairo to Field Marshal Jan Smuts; the painting here remained with his family in South Africa but the other was stolen and has never been traced.