The Statesman as Artist

During the summer of 1915, Winston Churchill’s spirits were at their lowest ebb in the aftermath of the disastrous troop landings in the Dardanelles at Gallipoli. As the most ardent advocate of what became this doomed operation, Churchill bore the brunt of the blame for the fiasco and was compelled to resign. Out of power, he fell into a depression so severe that his wife Clementine feared he would die of grief.

Shunned by the political establishment, Winston and Clementine sought refuge at Hoe Farm, a small country house they rented in Surrey, where Churchill’s younger brother Jack and his wife Gwendoline (known as “Goonie”) often came to stay. Goonie was an accomplished water-colourist, who brought her brushes and easel with her, and on one such visit she persuaded Churchill to try his hand at painting.

He was immediately captivated and soon changed to oils as being a stronger and more robust medium than watercolours. He sent Clementine to nearby Godalming to buy him paints, and on his return to London he opened an account with Roberson’s, the artist’s supplier in Long Acre, where he made regular purchases of paint, turpentine, canvasses, easels, and other materials.

At the end of 1915, Churchill re-joined the army and briefly commanded a battalion in Belgium on the Western Front. Now a painter as well as a soldier, he took his brushes and canvasses with him, and early in 1916 he completed several sombre pictures of the devastated buildings and war-torn countryside of Flanders. “I think,” he wrote to Clementine, “that painting will be a great pleasure and resource to me—if I come through all right.”

Churchill did, indeed, survive, his political fortunes gradually began to improve, he returned to government in 1917 as Minister of Munitions, and the Great War ended the following year. As his spirits revived, Churchill turned his