Jonathan asked: "Does anyone know what Sutherland's personal feelings toward Churchill were? It's looks like the sort of painting you'd do of someone you didn't like very well."
This is an old story, remarked as early as FINEST HOUR #4 back in 1969. If private property still has any meaning, Mr. Gekoski was whistling in the wind and CSC was within her rights to do as she wished. FH has vowed to our Patron never to run that portrait--it's easily Googled, after all. An authoritative account is in Mary Soames, "Churchill: His Life as a Painter" (London: Collins, 1990, 193-95). For an email transcript, email me offline. As to Sutherland's own feeling toward WSC, Lord Moran (for once) has his finger on the facts. From Moran, "Churchill....The Struggle for Survival" (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966, 659-60): ======== A lot of his time since the end of the war had been spent in arranging and editing the part he will play in history, and it has been rather a shock to him that his ideas and those of Graham Sutherland seem so far apart. "Filthy," he spluttered. "I think it is malignant." Was Winston fair to the artist? Sutherland's intentions, at any rate, seem to have been unexceptionable. The trouble was not that he admired the P.M. too little, but rather that he worshipped him too blindly. Graham Sutherland was thinking of the Churchill who had stopped the enemy and saved England, and the manner in which, without a word of guidance, Mr. Churchill took up a pose on the dais convinced the painter that he was on the right tack. "I wanted," he said, "to paint him with a kind of four-square look, to picture Churchill as a rock." One day at Chartwell - it was either the first or second sitting - Sutherland said to me: "There are so many Churchills. I have to find the real one." When I learnt that he intended to paint a lion at bay I tried to sound a warning note. "Don't forget," I said, "that Winston is always acting, try to see him when he has got the grease-paint off his face." But the artist paid no heed; he painted the P.M. as he pictured him in his own favourite part. And why should Winston complain, for surely it was he who created the role? All that Graham Sutherland did was to accept the legend for the truth. ======== -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "ChurchillChat" group. To post to this group, send email to churchillc...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to churchillchat+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/churchillchat?hl=en.
