Eventually, the frailties of old age caught up with Churchill. In 1958, he paid two long visits to La Pausa where he began to feel less and less inclined to pick up a brush (he caught bronchial pneumonia and suffered fevers while there); his physical strength was finally failing.
In 1959, Churchill visited Morocco – and Marrakech (where he’d painted some of his most acclaimed pictures) – and painted from his balcony at La Mamounia for the final time. And when he next visited La Pausa, later in 1959, he found himself no longer able to wield his paintbrush. But he continued to be feted and honoured, and he was treated as a great statesman, the ‘Old Warrior’, wherever he went.
He enjoyed a final visit to the White House in 1959 and made one last visit to New York on board the ‘Christina’ in 1961. In America, he became the second person after Revolutionary War hero the Marquis de Lafayette to receive honorary US citizenship and the first by Act of Congress. On 9 April 1963, Kennedy signed a Congressionally authorized proclamation conferring honorary US citizenship upon Churchill. Too frail to travel to America to attend the ceremony, Churchill watched from England via live satellite broadcast.
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