Sir Winston Churchill, K.G., O.M., F.R.S., HON. R.A.

A gift from the Artist to his daughter Mary, 1937

London, M. Knoedler & Co., "Painting as a Pastime" by Sir Winston Churchill K.G., O.M., C.H., May - June 1977, cat. no.38;
London, Wylma Wayne Fine Art, Sir Winston Churchill: Exhibition of Paintings, 24th June - 30th July 1982, cat. no.40, illustrated;
London, Sotheby's, Painting as a Pastime: Winston Churchill - His Life as a Painter, 5th - 17th January 1998, cat. no.67, illustrated p.138.

'The Paintings of Winston Churchill', LIFE, 7th January 1946, illustrated;
Winston Churchill, Painting as a Pastime, Odhams Press Ltd. and Ernest Benn Ltd., London, 1948, illustrated fig.10;
David Coombs, Churchill: His Paintings, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1967, cat. no.284, illustrated p.188;
David Coombs and Minnie S. Churchill, Sir Winston Churchill's Life through his Paintings, Chaucer Press, London, 2003, cat. no.C284, illustrated p.67;
David Coombs and Minnie S. Churchill, Sir Winston Churchill His Life and His Paintings, Ware House Publishing, Lyme Regis, 2011, cat. no.C284, illustrated p.67.

Original canvas. The paint surface appears to be in stable condition. On extremely close examination it is possible to see pinholes, consistent with the artist's working method, at the extreme edges of the composition. Subject to the above the work appears to be in very good condition. Ultraviolet light reveals small spots of fluorescence in the upper left corner, the lower right corner and the centre of the lower horizontal edge. These appear to be consistent with minor areas of retouching applied to conceal the pinholes. The painting is presented in a wooden fluted frame. Please contact the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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We are grateful to David Coombs for his kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work.

Almost as soon as he bought the house at Chartwell in 1922 – the same year his youngest daughter Mary was born – Winston Churchill set about building a complex of brick walls around the kitchen garden, a project he undertook himself, trowel in hand. For Churchill, laying a perfect row of bricks formed a neat equivalent to the problems he found in painting, requiring a set of precise yet intuitive skills that exercised a totally different part of his mind from that used for the cut and thrust of national politics.

Both the bricklayer and the painter start with nothing in front of them besides a loose concept of where things might go, although for the bricklayer at least the (repetitive) form of his material provides an underlying structure for him to follow, whereas the painter has to see everything in advance in his imagination. This, as Churchill wrote in ‘Painting as a Pastime’, was the real challenge – and the real joy - of painting, something equivalent to planning a military campaign yet more mysterious and ineffable.

In The Weald of Kent Under Snow, Churchill uses his beloved walls to map out the foreground of the image and frame the view of the rolling Weald beyond – this view being the reason he bought Chartwell in the first place. The burnt orange walls stand proud against the snow, a favoured device of the French Impressionists (who Churchill studied) used to draw out the abstract qualities of a landscape observed, as well as to create melancholic atmospheres dominated by blues. For a painter who confessed to a love of strong colour, Churchill was certainly adept with a more restrained palette, balancing the crisp white of the snow, the terracotta of the walls, the icy blue of the landscape beyond and the off-white sky (heavy with more snow). These harmonious bands of soft, close-toned colour are then countered by the stronger grey-greens of the trees that frame the composition and the shrubs that draw the eye from these edges to the centre. It is a picture that has both a deliberate artfulness and an easy naturalism, not least in the brick wall at the front of the composition that bends slightly, as if to stop the work becoming too formal.

For Mary Soames, Chartwell was always her home and this view – of both the landscape beyond and the garden walls built by her father – held a deep emotional resonance for her, something that no doubt prompted Churchill to give her this painting in 1937, when she was only 15. One of Mary’s fondest early memories was of her ‘first speech’ that she gave at the laying of the foundation stone (brick) of the little hut her father built into the garden walls for her, which became known to all the family as the ‘Marycot’.