Finest Hour 156, Autumn 2012 Page 56 Paintaceous Madeira By David Druckman David and Lynn Druckman are world travelers in quest of Churchill; David’s articles have...

Finest Hour 170, Fall 2015 Page 26 The design of the new Sir Winston Churchill Memorial Window...

Finest Hour 170, Fall 2015 Page 46 Review by Paul H Courtenay Fake or Fortune? Season Four, Episode Four Executive Producer: Simon Shaw First broadcast by the BBC on  26 July 2015...

Finest Hour 170, Fall 2015 Page 47 Review by David Freeman Andrew Marr on Churchill: Blood, Sweat, and Oil Paint Directed by David Barrie, Executive Producer for Wavelength Films: Patrick McGrady First broadcast by...

This picture … is about as presentable as anything I can produce. It shows the beautiful panorama of the snow-capped Atlas mountains in Marrakech. This is the view I persuaded your predecessor [Roosevelt] to see before he left North Africa after the Casablanca Conference [in 1943].

Have not Manet and Monet, Cézanne and Matisse, rendered to painting something of the same service which Keats and Shelley gave to poetry after the solemn and ceremonious literary perfections of the eighteenth century? They have brought back to the pictorial art a new draught of joie de vivre; and the beauty of their work is instinct with gaiety, and floats in sparkling air. I do not expect these masters would particularly appreciate my defence, but I must avow an increasing attraction to their work.

I was shown a picture by Cézanne of a blank wall of a house, which he had made instinct with the most delicate lights and colours.

Like a sea-beast fished up from the depths, or a diver too suddenly hoisted, my veins threatened to burst from the fall in pressure. I had great anxiety and no means of relieving it ... And then it was that the Muse of Painting came to my rescue — out of charity and out of chivalry ... — and said, “Are these toys any good to you? They amuse some people.”

One is quite astonished to find how many things there are in the landscape, and in every object in it, one never noticed before. And this is a tremendous new pleasure and interest which invests every walk or drive with an added object. So many colours on the hillside, each different in shadow and in sunlight; such brilliant reflections in the pool, each a key lower than what they repeat; such lovely lights gilding or silvering surface or outline, all tinted exquisitely with pale colour, rose, orange, green or violet.