Brush with History

One million pounds for a landscape with some sheep, painted by an amateur artist, may strike some as rather on the high side; but that was the winning bid at a recent auction at Sotheby's in London.

Then again, the amateur in question was Winston Churchill, and the view that of his beloved country estate Chartwell in Kent. He had given the painting to Henry Luce, who had serialized his wartime memoirs in Life, and the price was no fluke: Churchill's paintings have doubled in value over the past decade, which would no doubt have pleased him. Painting was important to Churchill: "If it weren't for painting, I could not live," he once noted. "I could not bear the strain of things."

In his long essay "Painting as a Pastime," Churchill recounts how he took it up in 1915 at the age of 40 after being sacked from the Admiralty after Gallipoli. Demoted to a sinecure in the cabinet with no influence on the conduct of the war, he was sulking at a country retreat in Surrey he had rented for his family. Here he found his sister-in-law painting in the garden, and after experimenting a little with the children's paint box, decided to get himself some proper equipment.

Having acquired easel and colors, he describes his first timid steps in front of the canvas: "The palette gleamed with beads of color. Fair and white rose the canvas, the empty brush hung poised, heavy with destiny, irresolute in the air. My hand seemed arrested by a silent veto." But noting that the sky was pale blue, he proceeded gingerly to load a "very small brush" with blue paint and, then, "with infinite precaution made a mark about as big as a bean on the affronted snow-white shield. It was a challenge, a deliberate challenge; but so subdued, so halting, indeed so cataleptic, that it deserved no response."