August 6, 2013

Finest Hour 120, Autumn 2003

Page 17

BY MIM HARRISON

David Coombs can still recall the moment in March 1965 when he stood in the dining room at Chartwell and surveyed some 300 to 400 of Winston Churchill’s canvases, stacked around the room. “My first thought was, ‘Blimey, what a big job!'” he says with a laugh.

Then an editor with The Connoisseur art magazine, David had inadvertently stumbled across what would become a life mission: cataloging Sir Winston’s paintings and establishing their provenance. An art historian and a Life Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, David has recently completed, in collaboration with Minnie Churchill of Churchill Heritage Ltd., Sir Winston Churchill’s Life Through His Paintings. Lady Soames has provided the foreword.

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The book catalogs 534 of Churchill’s paintings, including a dozen just discovered in the past six years. They represent nearly the entire body of Churchill’s work, which Minnie spent the last six years tracing from collections around the world. She has since provided a digitized archive to Churchill College, Cambridge.

David Coombs’ mission began shortly after Churchill’s death as he was taking a London train home to Surrey. “I noticed a headline in a newspaper about Churchill’s bequeathing his paintings to Clementine and thought: ‘She’s going to give them all away. There are going to be forgeries. There needs to be a catalogue.'”

That’s what had brought him to Chartwell two months later. He and Richard Pawsey, Churchill’s estate appraiser, set about titling the paintings and guessing at their dates. It took them a week, and for David it was an epiphany. “The more I looked at the paintings, I realized that these pictures could only have been done by a sensitive man. That was a revelation. I had always admired Churchill, but it had never occurred to me that war leaders could be sensitive.”

Minnie Churchill had had a similar revelation regarding both the man and his paintings. She first met Sir Winston in 1963, over lunch at his London home at 28 Hyde Park Gate. “Just before the end of lunch,” Minnie says, “Sir Winston rang for the butler and asked him to bring the cream jug back. Then he poured some cream directly onto the dining room table, and Jock, his ginger cat, jumped first on his lap and then on the table and lapped up the cream. I thought how special it was that he cared so much about his cat,” Minnie says, “although I hate to think what Lady Churchill would have thought.” Fortunately she was absent on this occasion!

That same year on a summer’s day at Chartwell, Minnie found herself in the dining room, much as David Coombs would two years later, gazing at row upon row of paintings stacked neatly on the floor. She knelt to have a closer look: “There were magnificent landscapes, seascapes, and still life scenes, as well as the occasional portrait. I had known that he painted, but I’d had no idea he was so prolific.”

The cataloging of Churchill’s paintings began in earnest shortly after David Coombs’ visit to Chartwell. His position at The Connoisseur gave him access to photographers to take pictures of the paintings. (It was a Hearst publication; Hearst himself had once hosted Churchill at his California “castle” at San Simeon.) Then David, Lady Churchill and Lady Soames worked on establishing the date and title for each one.

Entitled Churchill: His Paintings, David’s book was published in 1967. It became the bible for everyone interested in Sir Winston’s paintings. Even so, he says, “it was full of imperfections. We didn’t know when some were painted or what place they showed.”

Thirty years later, Sotheby’s in London approached David to work on an exhibition of Churchill’s paintings marking the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Churchill’s essay, Painting as a Pastime, in book form. The idea for a new and definitive book on WSC’s paintings was starting to take hold. By happy coincidence, at a dinner at Chartwell on Sir Winston’s birthday in November 1997, Minnie Churchill was seated next to Hubert Schaafsma, the owner of Pegasus Publishing in Limpsfield, Surrey. He was astonished to learn that no comprehensive work on Churchill the painter existed, and was interested in producing such a book. Anthea Morton-Saner, the agent for Churchill Heritage, was also at the dinner, and she knew the evening’s speaker: David Coombs. Shortly after that, she connected the three— David, Minnie and Hubert.

Fortunately, much had transpired in the chronicling of Churchill’s history since that March day in 1965, most notably the publication of Martin Gilbert’s biography of Churchill. “So much more had been written about him, even though it was still not that well known that he was a painter,” says David. “I dug around in the Churchill College archives and found some wonderful letters and press clippings. Walter Sickert had taught Churchill to work from photographs. In the studio at Chartwell, I found many of these photos that helped Churchill with his paintings, and some of these are in the book.” Among them are “Mary’s First Speech” and “Painting Lesson from Mr. Sickert.” These various bits of history all helped in establishing provenance.

Churchill also copied examples of works by artists he admired. Minnie cites both Daubigny and Sargent as sources of inspiration. And, she adds, “we recently found an exact copy of a seascape by Monet.”

Some of the first paintings Churchill did were of Hoe Farm, the country home he rented with his brother Jack in the summer of 1915, where he first picked up a paintbrush. Hoe Farm, which has been twice visited by Churchill Centre tours, is about five miles from David’s home in Godalming, Surrey; a trip to the local museum uncovered a contemporary photograph of it that is reproduced in the book.

“My whole point of doing this work was to protect the reputation of the artist,” says David. “Why does someone want to own a painting by Winston Churchill? Not because it’s attractive, but because it’s Churchill. Unless it can be reasonably proved that the painting came from Winston or Clementine, it’s probably not authentic—even if it has his initials on it.”

Churchill rarely signed his paintings and usually added his initials only when he was about to give a painting away. That might have been years after he had painted it. Often his “daubs,” as he called them, were “signed” by his frame maker, Frank Patrickson, who added WSC’s initials using a brass template.

To a lesser extent, the canvases also helped to establish provenance. As David points out, the back of a painting can reveal more of its history than the front. Most of Churchill’s canvases were from Roberson’s in London, although he occasionally used Blanchet of Paris; both were stamped with the firm’s name. In the course of authenticating paintings for auction houses and individuals, David has sometimes dismissed a contender based on a canvas that’s too new.

There are even three paintings in the new book whose authentication David is still questioning. “Two I don’t think are Churchill, and one I do—but I can’t accept either assessment until I know the provenance.”

He and Minnie did, however, uncover at least a dozen new and true gems, pictured in the book for the first time. One is a painting of Honfleur in France, now in a collection in California. Another is an unidentified landscape owned by the son of the person who received it from Churchill. David also discovered two preliminary sketches that Churchill drew, which are reproduced for the first time in this new edition.

Among the handful of paintings that are still lost are some that were featured in the original version of Painting as a Pastime, published in The Strand Magazine in 1921-22. The painting depicting a view of the moat at Breccles is one such. But discovering the original text of Painting as a Pastime in The Strand was itself a find, and for David one of the high points of his work. Churchill, after all, painted vivid pictures with his words as well as with his oils. “The way that he wrote about his paintings was very important,” David maintains. “Painting as a Pastime is about how to paint, not how to be an artist.”

“For forty years, this relatively unknown side to this great man gave him such enormous pleasure,” says Minnie, who in her role as director of Churchill Heritage oversees the copyright protection of Churchill’s paintings. “Painting saw him through good times and bad, dark days and bright.” One of the moments chronicled in Sir Winston Churchill’s Life Through His Paintings is the day that Sir John Rothenstein, director of the Tate Gallery in 1948, toured Churchill’s studio at Chartwell. He recalled Churchill saying, “If it weren’t for painting I couldn’t live; I couldn’t bear the strain of things.” Happily, Churchill’s paintings and their provenance will live on.

Sir Winston Churchill’s Life Through His Paintings, by David Coombs with Minnie Churchill, debuts this autumn with a trade edition in Britain and a limited deluxe edition from Levenger Press in America. The Levenger edition, leatherbound in a matching leather slipcase, is limited to a numbered printing of 1500. This edition contains a special message from Minnie Churchill. Since it will precede all other editions in the United States, Levenger’s will be the true “American first.” 

Ms. Harrison is the editor of Levenger Press, which has published a limited edition of Sir Winston Churchill’s Life Through His Paintings.