“The Wealth of Pictures That Would Delight So Many”
On 23 October 1955, Miss Gertrude Jeans, aged seventy-one, of Croydon wrote to Sir Gerald Kelly, the past president of London’s Royal Academy of Arts: “Please forgive a stranger for troubling you on a matter which may not be within your province at all, but I do not know to whom more fittingly I can address myself on a subject which has long been on my mind. It is with reference to Sir Winston Churchill’s paintings.”1
Miss Jeans appreciated the academy’s effort to display the occasional Churchill painting, but desired more. She noted, “the few meagre annual exhibits at the Royal Academy give but little idea of the wealth of pictures that would delight so many to view….” She had something grander in mind. Miss Jeans acknowledged that, for the lofty academy, Churchill’s status as an amateur artist might be a roadblock, one she navigated around while stating her case for Churchill: “I suppose the formal answer to this scheme will probably be ‘Sir Winston is not a professional painter.’ But he was acknowledged as ‘R. A. Extraordinary’ and is not everything about him extraordinary?” she asked, adding: “‘Come to that,’ he is not a professional saviour of civilization either, yet is freely acknowledged as such the
