Winston Churchill, Painter: Charles Morin, David Winter and the Studio at Chartwell

In June 1915 Winston Churchill was forty years old and out of a job that mattered. The Dardanelles campaign and the Gallipoli landings had gone badly, the blame had settled on him, and he had been moved from the Admiralty to the minor post of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. He withdrew with Clementine and the children to Hoe Farm, near Godalming in Surrey. There his sister-in-law Gwendoline, known as Goonie, introduced him to painting. She lent him her young son’s paint box.

That loan began a habit that lasted the rest of his working life. The International Churchill Society reckons he painted for about forty years. The National Trust, which looks after his house at Chartwell in Kent, counts more than 550 known canvases.

Churchill later described the moment in Painting as a Pastime, comparing himself to a deep sea creature hauled too fast to the surface, his veins ready to burst from the drop in pressure. “And then it was that the Muse of Painting came to my rescue”, he wrote. It is a vivid image, and it explains a good deal about the paintings that followed. They were made by a man who needed them to work as relief, not as a career.

Hobbies, in the plural

Churchill had firm views about why a busy person should paint. Writing in the Pall Mall Gazette in December 1925, he argued that a person needed two or three hobbies, and that they had to be real ones. The Society’s account of him as an amateur artist stresses how modest he was about his ability. Writing books paid; painting was not meant to. He did not expect masterpieces. He did, the Society says, take the work seriously and want to improve.

The two most curious episodes of his painting life suggest that he also wanted to know whether the work would stand up without his famous name attached.

Charles Morin in the rue Royale

In 1921 a small group of paintings went on show at the Galerie Druet, 20 rue Royale, in Paris. The artist’s name on them was Charles Morin. According to research published by the International Churchill Society, the show was arranged by Charles Montag, a Swiss-born painter who lived from 1880 to 1956, was a friend of Churchill’s, and had shown at the same gallery in 1914. Six paintings were displayed, and six were sold. The Society’s account of the amateur artist puts the price at £30 each.

Morin was a real name. Charles Camille Morin, a French painter of landscapes in the manner of the Barbizon school, had lived from 1846 to 1919. Churchill was therefore borrowing the name of an artist who had been dead for only two years, and the Society’s researchers found no clear explanation for the choice. Nor did the gallery’s papers help: the Druet archive, held by the Wildenstein Institute, contained no record of the exhibition.

The pseudonym had a long afterlife. In 1942, in the middle of the war, President Roosevelt asked about Churchill’s painting pseudonym, and official telegrams had to set the record straight. The name was Morin, they confirmed, not Marin.

The same year as the Paris show, Churchill was pricing his work privately as well. In October 1921 he offered paintings to interested friends at £50 each. Lady Hamilton chose a view of Ightham Mote, catalogued as Coombs 235.

David Winter at the Royal Academy

The Paris exhibition answered one version of the question. The Royal Academy answered another. In 1927 his painting Winter Sunshine, Chartwell won a prize. In 1947 he submitted two paintings to the Academy’s Summer Exhibition under the name David Winter, and both were accepted.

The disguise did not last. In 1948 the Royal Academy made him Honorary Academician Extraordinary, a title that meant his paintings hung at the annual exhibition as of right. The Society notes that Sir John Rothenstein, director of the Tate Gallery, then asked for a painting for the national collection. The choice fell on a view of the Loup River in the south of France, painted in 1936. Tate lists it as The Loup River, Alpes Maritimes.

Recognition brought requests. Churchill received many invitations to lend pictures for exhibitions in Britain and abroad and generally refused them. He was, the Society says, rather pleased when the greeting card company Hallmark asked permission to reproduce his paintings.

The studio at Chartwell

The best place to see the work as a body is still Chartwell. The National Trust describes the studio there as holding the largest collection of his paintings. It was set up in the 1930s as a dedicated place to paint and was enlarged in the 1950s. It gave Churchill somewhere to work without interruption when he was not painting outdoors, and it spared Clementine’s furnishings from his paint.

The studio is kept as if he had just stepped out. His easel stands with an unfinished canvas, his paints are laid out, and the armchair he painted from is in place. The walls carry views of Chartwell itself alongside scenes from his travels in Europe, Africa and North America. The room also holds his only attempt at sculpture, made in 1954 while Oscar Nemon was sculpting him.

The Trust also quotes him on the plainest of his pleasures in the craft: that painting was simply fun, and that the colours were lovely to look at and delicious to squeeze out. The sentiment is a reminder that, for all the pseudonyms and prizes, the motive stayed close to the one he described at Hoe Farm.

Putting away the oils

The end came gradually. In 1958, staying at La Pausa in the south of France, he felt less and less inclined to paint. In 1959 he made a last trip to Marrakech and painted from the balcony of La Mamounia. Later that year, back at La Pausa, he painted his last picture and stopped for good.

That leaves a career of a little over four decades, from the borrowed paint box in Surrey to the hotel balcony in Morocco. Churchill never claimed to be more than an amateur. What the record shows is a man who tested his work under false names in Paris and London, accepted the Academy’s honour when it came, and kept painting long after the thing he had first turned to it for, rescue from political disgrace, had been replaced by far larger events.