Posted Saturday morning, September 26, 2020.
Detail from a painting of Winston Churchill painting by Paul Lucien Maze. 1931(?). Courtesy of the National Churchill Museum at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, where Churchill delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech in 1946. Via the Churchill Project.
I don't know art, but I know what I like, and I like Winston Churchill's paintings, or, really, I like it that he painted and I like his paintings because he painted them. Was he actually any good? For what it's worth, his granddaughter, Edwina Sandys, a painter herself, thinks he was a good painter. "He was good," she says, "because he painted the things he loved." On the other hand, his niece, Clarissa Eden, Countess of Avon, calls him a poor painter with no natural talent: "My uncle didn't have a good eye. He did painting; they were quite nice, but he wasn't an aesthete." At any rate, here' something that struck me funny from “Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom” by Thomas E. Ricks.
When Churchill was in public, he was rarely quiet---and to Churchill, almost everything was public. The only activity Violet Asquith remembered him practice in silence in his entire life was painting, a hobby he picked up when middle-aged and out of office in a kind of political exile. In conversation, when he exhausted his own thoughts, he would keep himself talking by reciting great chunks of poetry, often by Byron or Pope.
Would it be possible to have an exhibition of Churchill's paintings and Hitler's?
Posted by: CJColucci | Friday, October 02, 2020 at 01:13 PM