"Difficult? Fascinating!"

At that moment the loud approaching sound of a motorcar was heard in the drive. From this chariot there stepped swiftly and lightly none other than the gifted wife of Sir John Lavery. 'Painting! But what are you hesitating about? Let me have a brush--the big one.' Splash into the turpentine, wallop into the blue and the white, frantic flourish on the palette . . . and then several large, fierce strokes and slashes of blue on the absolutely cowering canvas. Anyone could see that it could not hit back. . . . The sickly inhibitions rolled away. I seized the largest brush and fell upon my victim with Berserk fury. I have never felt any awe of a canvas since.

Thus Winston Churchill remembers his first vigorous move, in 1915, towards his favorite hobby. Back in 1915, as a fallen Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill had need of an absorbing activity. He had long hours of unwanted leisure. "And then it was," he wrote, "that the Muse of Painting came to my rescue . . . and said, 'Are these toys any good to you? They amuse some people.' "

Cataleptic Challenge. Churchill's first tries were with watercolor. One Sunday morning his restless extrovert eye fell on his sister-in-law, Lady Gwendeline, sketching in a garden. He seized on a painting kit belonging to the children of the house and took his first plunge. He changed to oils the next day, as soon as he could get to a supply shop. Like most amateurs, and very like himself, he at once bought a lot of magnificent apparatus, including portable easels for traveling.

Then, as he wrote in Amid These Storms (1932): ". . . The next step was to begin. But what a step to take! The palette gleamed with beads of color; fair and white rose the canvas; the empty brush hung poised, heavy with destiny, irresolute in the air. My hand seemed arrested by a silent veto. But after all the sky on this occasion was unquestionably blue, and a pale blue at that. It is a starting-point open to all. So very gingerly I mixed a little blue paint . . . and then with infinite precaution made a mark about as big as a bean upon the affronted snow-white shield. It was a challenge . . . but so subdued, so halting, indeed so cataleptic, that it deserved no response."

Prime Minister's Pointers. Churchill's chief friends in the art world were the English academic masters Sir John Lavery, Walter Sickert, Sir William Orpen. From Lavery he took lessons, from Sickert and Orpen, advice and encouragement. All of them influenced him. But one day in the south of France he met two impressionists at work and talked with them. Of their effect on him he later wrote: "Look also at the blue of the Mediterranean. How can you depict and record it? Certainly not by any single color that was ever manufactured. The only way in which that luminous intensity of blue can be simulated is by [a] ... multitude of tiny points ... all in true relation to the rest of the scheme. Difficult? Fascinating!"

Churchill once showed some of his work, under the name of Charles Morini, in a Paris exhibition. Four Churchill oils were sold (for -L-30 each). Once a Churchill painting went for an even higher price at a Balmoral benefit. But the Prime Minister keeps most of his 300-odd pictures in his own studio. (In Marrakech, Morocco, on a day off after the Casablanca Conference with President Roosevelt, he painted a view of the Atlas Mountains.)

Blenheim and Bottles. The impressionist touches included, the pictures are pleasant and conventional -- a sanguine, unsentimental record of things the Prime Minister has loved or been interested in during the past 25 years. Churchill's subjects: a room in the house of a friend, a set of brandy and whiskey bottles, an arm of an inland lake bordered by tall trees. Said George Bernard Shaw: "Churchill's recreations are civilized --painting and bricklaying -- not hunting and shooting."

Having selected a subject he likes, Churchill paints what he sees before him, quite as he sees it. He will miss lunch to finish a picture or to seize upon lighting he wants before the sun changes. He has always seemed best with interiors, next best with landscape. His drawing is that of an apt, if hurried, pupil of the Royal Academy, to which he once addressed a toast: "The Royal Academy is an institution of wealth and power for the purpose of encouraging the arts. It would be disastrous if the control of this machine fell into the hands of any particular school of artistic thought which would exclude all others."

Artist Adolf Hitler has reputedly declared his intention of becoming a great painter after the war. Winston Churchill has declared nothing of the sort. But he has written: "When I get to heaven I mean to spend a considerable portion of my first million years in painting, and so get to the bottom of the subject. But then I shall require a still gayer palette than I get here below. I expect orange and vermilion will be the darkest, dullest colors upon it. . . ."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.