![]() There's a sculpted quality to his sturdy bald head that reminds you of Roman busts. The man himself still has a stoic authority he might be the ancient Roman Cicero waiting to be murdered. The painting is black and rough, as if burnt, as if Churchill were emerging from the ruins of Europe, from a world not saved but shattered. Old, grumpy, with an anger that no longer seems leavened by the humour and verbal creativity of the Churchill of legend, this is a reactionary curmudgeon surrounded by the shades of night. It's not simply that Sutherland's modernist tendencies irked the conservative tastes of the Sunday painter prime minister. This painted sketch of Churchill's head, a study for the lost, full-length painting, suggests why. It was destroyed by his wife Clementine.ĭistinguishing features: The destruction of Sutherland's painting is one of the most notorious cases of a subject disliking their portrait. The finished painting was presented to Churchill. Sutherland was commissioned by both Houses of Parliament to paint a full-length portrait of Churchill in 1954, for which this is a study. The war leader's final period of power was marked by dwindling health and, in 1955, he retired. Churchill, however, became prime minister again at the beginning of the 1950s, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his six-volume The Second World War. He was reduced to lecture tours in the US, where his melodramatic image of an "iron curtain" fired nascent cold war imaginations. Subject: Sir Winston Spencer Churchill (1874-1965) had already suffered a stroke, concealed from the public, when he was returned as prime minister in the 1951 election.Īfter a career marked by extraordinary achievements - war correspondent during the Boer war, Liberal home secretary (hated for setting troops against striking miners) and his finest hour as wartime prime minister - Churchill's strangest, least celebrated times came after the war.įor all his popularity abroad, the British electorate rejected him in 1945. But he seems destined to remain an also-ran of 20th century art history. Sutherland was championed notably by the 1980s critic Peter Fuller, who saw his romanticism as a viable, moral option for artists now. In the 1950s and 1960s, he was outshone by the younger, harsher Francis Bacon then, by the time of pop art, was left looking old. However, Sutherland's star never quite rose as high as his supporters hoped. Sutherland brought together his passionate sense of landscape and modern awareness of violence in paintings of bomb damage during the Blitz.
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