Search results
The Portrait of Winston Churchill was a painting by English artist Graham Sutherland that depicted the British prime minister Sir Winston Churchill, created in 1954. It was disliked by Churchill and within a year it had been destroyed.
People also ask
How did Churchill celebrate his 80th birthday?
Did Churchill get a Sutherland portrait?
Where did Churchill's portrait go after he died?
Why did Churchill burn a painting?
May 31, 2024 · The artist Graham Sutherland’s infamous 1954 portrait of Sir Winston Churchill, commissioned by Parliament for his 80th birthday so enraged its aged subject, his faithful secretary had it destroyed.
- 30 November 1954
- How Did We Get Here?
- Sitting For Sutherland
- “Mortal Affront”
- “Something I Never Expected to See”
- The Fate of The Sutherland
- Culpability?
- The Author
- Endnotes and Further Reading
The scene is familiar to students of Churchill’s life. It is his eightieth birthday. In London, both Houses of Parliament have assembled in Westminster Hall to celebrate the occasion. They present him with the gift of a portrait, paid for by parliamentary subscription. They intend it to remain with him for his lifetime, and then to hang in the Pala...
In June 1954 the cumbersomely named “Churchill Joint Houses of Parliament Gift Committee” decided on the presentation of a portrait and who should receive the commission. Their first choice of Sir Herbert Gunn was rejected because he was too expensive. Gunn’s portrait of King George VIsuggests a work by him would have been more conventional, and fl...
Things started off hopefully enough. On 1 September Clementine Churchill wrote her daughter Mary: “Mr. Graham Sutherland is a ‘Wow’… [One] can hardly believe that the savage cruel designs which he exhibits come from his brush. Papa has given him three sittings & no one has seen the beginnings of the portrait except Papa & he is much struck by the p...
Churchill’s doctor Lord Moran worried that Sutherland would give up and “paint the legend.” Sir Winston, Moran said, “is always acting. Try to see him when he has got the greasepaint off his face.”3Sutherland felt he had solved the problem after he was able to observe and sketch Churchill playing a combative game of bezique, his guard temporarily d...
Sutherland had an explanation. In 1961 he would tell Lord Beaverbrook: “For better or worse, I am the kind of painter who is governed entirely by what he sees. I am at the mercy of my sitter. What he feels, or shows at the time, I try to record.”7 And 1954 was a bad time to have Churchill as a sitter. Four years later David McFall, working on Sir W...
The public never saw the portrait again. That is not to say that there was no demand for it. On 4 May 1960 the bursar of Churchill College wrote asking for various items they might display, including the Sutherland. There came a prompt and chilly response from Anthony Montague Browne, Churchill’s private secretary. “The suggestion about Graham Suth...
It is unrealistic to hold Sutherland culpable for Churchill’s disappointment. He delivered his commission. A painter, not a photographer, he worked within his brief and certainly within his style. Everyone knew Sutherland’s work at the time. It should have been clear, especially given his 1951 portrayal of Lord Beaverbrook, that he was no purveyor ...
Mr. Turrell has recently retired from a lifetime career in Information Technology. A longtime Churchill bibliophile and collector, he was formerly associate editor of Finest Hour.
1 Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill, His Complete Speeches, 1897-1963, 8 vols. (New York: Bowker, 1974), VIII, 8608. 2 Mary Soames, Clementine Churchill: The Biography of a Marriage (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970, 587. 3 Roger Berthoud, Graham Sutherland: A Biography (London: Faber & Faber, 1982), 189. 4 Jonathan Black, Winston Church...
Searches related to winston churchill portrait on 80th birthday
winston churchill portrait on 80th birthday by sutherland winston churchill Sep 28, 2022 · English modernist painter Graham Sutherland with his unfinished portrait of Winston Churchill, 1954. What Sutherland produced in that same studio, however, was to be very a different painting. The sittings were, according to later accounts, rife with tension.
Apr 17, 2024 · Sutherland was commissioned by the Houses of Parliament to paint Churchill to mark his 80th birthday in 1954. The full-length portrait was unveiled in Parliament that year, with Churchill calling it, with a smirk, “a remarkable example of modern art.”
Apr 17, 2024 · Amid the pomp of Churchill’s 80th birthday celebrations (he received 150,000 gifts from around the world), the Houses of Parliament commissioned Sutherland to paint a portrait. At the time, the Churchill was ostensibly riding on a triumphal wave, having become an exalted figure in the early 1950s.
A portrait of Churchill was commissioned by the members of the House of Lords and the House of Commons to celebrate the Prime Minister’s 80th birthday in November 1954. More like this. How...
