11/21/2023 0 Comments Winston churchill painting burned![]() He’s still a national hero, but he’s also a guy who has an affair. Artist: Graham Sutherland (1903-1980), one of the neo-romantic painters who dominated British art during the second world war and its aftermath. “Churchill has been deified, but this story allows us to view him as a far more complex character. Graham Sutherlands Winston Churchill (1954) by Jonathan Jones. “It underscores his greatness that in the midst of all that pressure he can break off to deal with that potential problem,” Dr Dockter told The Telegraph. “When he’s leading his country in a global war and under enormous pressure, he comes to fear that people might get wind of the affair he’d had with Lady Castlerosse. There is no record of Churchill’s reaction, but shortly after Churchill’s friend and ally, the newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook, met Lady Castlerosse’s brother and took possession of the painting, only returning it to the family at the end of the war.ĭr Dockter says the revelations about Churchill's affair with Lady Castlerosse and his portrait of her she new light on the wartime leader. On December 9, 1942, she died of an overdose of sleeping pills at the Dorchester Hotel, in London’s Park Lane. Sutherland considered the destruction of his painting an act of vandalism, but when one considers that portraits, particularly official ones for public display, have always been a combination of visual record and propaganda, it is perhaps unsurprising that a likeness the subject did not consider flattering should have been suppressed.Churchill and Lady Castlerosse never have the chance to meet again. Sir Nicholas Soames, Churchill's grandson, was outraged. Word came that this was not the first Churchill portrait his wife saw fit to condemn: those by Paul Maze and Walter Sickert also disappeared under her watch. In April last year, Labour candidate Benjamin Whittingham tweeted that Churchill was 'a racist and white supremacist'. Lady Churchill had hidden it in the cellar at Chartwell at her request, the Churchills’ private secretary, Grace Hamblin, had it removed and secretly burned on a bonfire. It was destroyed shortly thereafter, with news of its obliteration emerging only in 1978. ![]() The work was destined for permanent display in the Houses of Parliament after Churchill’s death, but it was initially given to him as a gift. One of his political opponents described it as ‘a beautiful work’, while an ally dismissed it as ‘disgusting’. The presentation was to be televised, which meant Churchill was obliged to compliment the painting, though he did so with faint (one might say feint) praise, saying that it displayed ‘force and candour’ and was ‘a remarkable example of modern art’. He was persuaded only with great difficulty to accept the portrait at the ceremony in order to avoid causing offence. Grace enlisted her burly brother to help her sneak the painting out of the Churchills cellar in the dead of night and burned it on a bonfire several miles away. Ten days before the official presentation, he wrote to Sutherland, rejecting the painting and declaring that the ceremony would not include it. On seeing a photograph of it, he called it ‘malignant … filthy’. While Lady Churchill was said to have remarked that it looked ‘really quite alarmingly like him’, and Churchill’s son, Randolph, thought it made his father look ‘disenchanted’, the sitter himself hated it at once. ![]() The result, when it was revealed on Novemto Clementine Churchill, was not a smashing success. YouTube is wrong to rush to judgement on Russell BrandĬhurchill reluctantly accepts Graham Sutherland’s portrait in Westminster Hall in November 1954
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