Sir Winston Churchill, K.G., O.M., F.R.S., HON. R.A.

A gift from the Artist to his daughter Mary

London, Royal Academy of Arts, Summer Exhibition, 1948, cat. no.149;
Kansas City, The Nelson Gallery, Winston Churchill the Painter, 1958, cat. no.18, with tour to Detroit, New York, Washington, Providence, Dallas, Minneapolis and Los Angeles, Toronto, Montreal, Fredericton, Vancouver, Canberra, Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Hobart, Adelaide, and Perth; 
London, Royal Academy of Arts Diploma Gallery, Winston Churchill Honorary Academician Extraordinary, 1959, unnumbered, illustrated;
London, M. Knoedler & Co., "Painting as a Pastime" by Sir Winston Churchill K.G., O.M., C.H., May - June 1977, cat. no.29, illustrated;
London, Wylma Wayne Fine Art, Sir Winston Churchill: Exhibition of Paintings, 24th June - 30th July 1982, cat. no.3, illustrated;
New York, National Academy of Design, Painting as a Pastime: The Paintings of Winston S. Churchill, 12th May - 3rd July 1983, with tour to Washington D.C., Smithsonian Institution Castle Building, 21st September - 2nd November 1983, illustrated;
Tokyo, Sir Winston Churchill Exhibition in Japan, with tour to Kagoshima, Aichi and Kanagawa, April - June 1998;
London, Sotheby’s, Painting as a Pastime: Winston Churchill - His Life as a Painter, 5th - 17th January 1998, cat. no.43, illustrated p.114.

Winston Churchill, Painting as a Pastime, Odhams Press Ltd. and Ernest Benn Ltd., London, 1948, illustrated fig.4;
Bruce Ingram (ed.), 'An Eightieth Year Tribute to Winston Churchill', The Illustrated London News, 1954, illustrated;
David Coombs, Churchill: His Paintings, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1967, cat. no.11, illustrated p.92;
Mary Soames, Winston Churchill: His Life as a Painter, William Collins Sons & Co. , London, 1990, cat. no.38, illustrated p.110;
David Coombs and Minnie S. Churchill, Sir Winston Churchill's Life through his Paintings, Chaucer Press, London, 2003, cat. no.C11, illustrated p.58;
David Coombs and Minnie S. Churchill, Sir Winston Churchill His Life and His Paintings, Ware House Publishing, Lyme Regis, 2011, cat. no.C11, illustrated p.58.

Original canvas. There are pinholes at the corners of the canvas which appear to be consistent with the artist's working method. There is a small area of craquelure in the lower left quadrant, with further traces of reticulation in the lower and upper left hand quadrant and to the green pigment in the upper right. These appear to be stable and do not detract from the aesthetic appeal of the painting. There is some minor frame abrasion to the lower horizontal edge of the canvas. Subject to the above the work appears to be in good condition. Ultraviolet light reveals no obvious signs of florescence or retouching. The painting is presented in an ornate gilded frame. Please contact the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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We are grateful to David Coombs for his kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work.

By 1929, Winston Churchill found himself out of office and entering a time of unexpected and unwelcome inaction and introspection. He therefore embarked on what was to be a four-volume biography of his ancestor, John Churchill, First Duke of Marlborough. John Churchill (1650-1722) had risen, through sheer ambition, to become one of the richest and most powerful men in Britain, influential at the courts of five different monarchs, from James II to Queen Anne. His fame and fortune was based on his skills as a diplomat and his remarkable success as a general, with a string of stunning victories on the continent during the War of the Spanish Succession, including that at Blenheim (1704). Showered with riches by a ‘grateful nation’, John Churchill commissioned Vanbrugh to build him a spectacular house, in the Baroque style, that would take its name from this famous battlefield – the palace in which Winston Spencer Churchill would be born a century and a half later.

The tapestry room at Blenheim Palace commemorates the military campaign that paid for the surrounding splendour. Winston would have known them well from childhood, but as he sat to paint them in 1930, the glory they depict must have held a bittersweet taste. The First Duke had also suffered from a fall from grace (with the building of the Palace itself having much to do with it). And so he decided to paint these trophies of a man’s success in all their rich, golden, flickering glory. It is a celebration of what it means to be a Churchill at the best of times, a riposte to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. In Painting as a Pastime, Churchill confessed to a weakness for bright colour and here, in Tapestries at Blenheim, he revels in the opportunities afforded by the sumptuous gilding of the walls and furniture, the emerald green of the chairs, the reds and blues of the tapestry border (rendered with an Impressionist’s eye) and the intense turquoise of the room beyond.

Around the time the present work was painted, Sickert was a particularly close friend and mentor. Unlike Churchill however, Sickert was not attracted to bright colours, quite the opposite in fact, and of the techniques he taught Churchill, one was how to paint in monochrome. Tapestries at Blenheim certainly has the feel of a Sickert, in the way it is concerned more with the painting’s surface than the subject matter itself, but the palette is entirely Churchill's own, a very un-Sickert riot of red, blue and gold.