The Hottest Ticket in Town, 1946 By Donald P. Lofe, Jr. President and Chief Transformation Officer and Churchill Fellow, Westminster CollegeDirector, International Churchill Societ...
Churchill painting at the Moulin de Montreuil, while staying with Jacques and Consuelo Balsan in August 1939 in the last weeks of peace before the Second World War...
copyright: Churchill Heritage Ltd, with kind permission of Anthea Morton-Saner, on behalf of Churchill Heritage Ltd...
One of the preparatory sketches, which is on display at the National Portrait Gallery, London (oil on canvas, 1954) copyright: National Portrait Gallery, London...
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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 . 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 in 1921, 1922 and 1946, in the 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.
£100,000? £250,000? £700,000? £1 million? Churchill’s paintings can now command a considerable sale price, particularly if they have impeccable provenance (as in the case of the painting given to Truman). The Truman gift, ‘Marrakech’, (according to the auction house, Sotheby’s, ‘arguably superior’ to ‘View of Tinherir’ ‘in both composition and provenance’) was sold in December 2007 with a guide price of £300, 000–£500,000, achieving £468,700. At the time of the sale, the Sotheby’s specialist in twentieth century British art said: ‘The rise of Churchill through the art market over the past few years has been remarkable and we are thrilled to be bringing another of his most important and accomplished works to the saleroom at a time when interest in his amazing ‘pastime’ is stronger than ever ... ‘Marrakech’ ... is a superb example of Churchill at his very best’ (). (The less ‘superior’ painting entitled ‘View of Tinherir’ given by Churchill in 1953 as a gift to US General George Marshall, was sold at auction in 2006 by his granddaughter, for £612,800. It had been expected to fetch about £250,000.) A July 2007 auction saw a record £1,000,000 for a Churchill painting, ‘Chartwell Landscape with Sheep’, originally presented to Clare Booth Luce.
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