Churchill spent much of his leisure time at Chartwell, the house and grounds he bought in 1922 set in the rolling countryside of Kent. When he wasn’t bricklaying, building tree houses for the children or feeding his menagerie of animals, he spent much of his time painting, particularly in his ‘wilderness years’. His studio at Chartwell is today much as it was when he was alive and many of his paintings can be seen on its walls. He generally preferred light and colour and, when the weather wouldn’t comply and he couldn’t paint out of doors, he often resorted to still-life studies of fruit, bottles and glassware (hence ‘Bottlescape’, his painting of a range of drinks and glasses, both full and empty.) His nephew Peregrine has said that Churchill, on receiving a large bottle of brandy for Christmas, sent his children round the house looking for other bottles to put alongside it, for a still life. Peregrine told Richard M. Langworth, the editor of , that Churchill said: ‘Fetch me associate and fraternal bottles to form a bodyguard to this majestic container’ ().

While supremely confident and self-assured in most fields of life, Churchill was generally modest about his achievements as a painter; he didn’t aspire to create masterpieces – he never claimed he had ever painted one – and didn’t intend to earn money from his pastime (unlike his other craft of writing). But he did have a certain ambition for his art. In 1921, only six years after he’d first tried his hand with a brush, he is said to have sold up to six paintings he’d exhibited in Paris under the pseudonym Charles Morin at Galerie Druet for the princely sum of £30.00 each. In 1947 he successfully submitted two paintings to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition under the name David Winter (including ‘Winter Sunshine, Chartwell’, which had won a prize in 1927).

Churchill took up painting in 1915 at the age of forty after his sudden fall from office over the disastrous Dardanelles campaign. He hoped it would provide a distraction, and he threw himself into it wholeheartedly.

At the birthday celebrations at Westminster Hall in November 1954, Churchill was presented with a portrait by Graham Sutherland, commissioned by past and present members of the House of Commons and the House of Lords. It was Sutherland’s practice to prepare detailed sketches, almost completely finished works, often close-ups of the heads of his sitters. Apparently Churchill had asked Sutherland at the outset, ‘How are you going to paint me? As a cherub, or the Bulldog?’ Sutherland is said to have replied: ‘It depends on what you show me, sir.’ He later told Beaverbrook that ‘Consistently ... he showed me the Bull Dog’. Churchill loathed the finished portrait (he later said it was ‘malignant’), perhaps because it conveyed all too accurately the frailties of old age, although when presented with it on his birthday, he carefully described it as ‘a remarkable example of modern art’. It was later, controversially, destroyed on the orders of Clementine. Churchill made his last major speech in the House of Commons on 1 March 1955 – a carefully prepared, and passionate, speech, in which he suggested that the power of nuclear weapons might lead to peace through deterrence. For a full transcript of his final speech, ‘Never Despair’, click .

‘So much of him still lives in his paintings at Chartwell’ – so says the narrator of this 1968 documentary, which shows some of the paintings on display at Churchill’s...

British Pathe newsreel from 1953 showing Churchill arriving at Nice airport for a holiday at Lord Beaverbrook’s villa at Cap D’ail for some rest and painting https://wwwyoutubecom/embed/DYPmtSLcYHU copyright: British...

copyright: Churchill Heritage Ltd, with kind permission of Anthea Morton-Saner, on behalf of Churchill Heritage Ltd...

copyright: Churchill Heritage Ltd, with kind permission of Anthea Morton-Saner, on behalf of Churchill Heritage Ltd...

This painting, of the garden of his friend, the Conservative MP Sir Philip Sassoon (Trent Park, New Barnet, Hertfordshire) hangs in the Studio at Chartwell copyright: Churchill Heritage Ltd, with...