Version of Churchill’s hated portrait immortalized in ‘The Crown’ fetches $840,000 at auction

By Caitlin Chatterton, CNN

(CNN) — “That is not a painting, it’s a humiliation!” Winston Churchill (played by John Lithgow) angrily tells the renowned painter Graham Sutherland (actor Stephen Dillane) in the first season of “The Crown,” Netflix’s six-series dramatization about the English monarchy. Churchill is talking about his own portrait, commissioned to celebrate his 80th birthday, as it is unveiled in London’s Westminster Hall in November 1954.

Churchill goes on to describe his appearance in the painting as “a broken, sagging, pitiful creature,” Sutherland as “a Judas wielding his murderous brush,” and concludes the whole work is “a betrayal of friendship, and an unpatriotic, treacherous, cowardly assault by the individualistic left!”

The episode ends with Churchill’s wife Clementine (played by Harriet Walter) watching it burn on a bonfire outside their home.

Evidently, he was not a fan.

While “The Crown” is not a documentary, it is true that the 80th birthday portrait —described by Churchill as “filthy and malignant” in a letter to his personal doctor — was burned.

“I think he was quite vain about his image,” Andre Zlattinger, Deputy Chairman UK and Head of Modern British & Irish Art at Sotheby’s, explained during a press briefing. “He’d had a stroke in 1953 so for him (how he was perceived) was important at that time. He’d won the election in 1951 by a narrow margin, and there was quite a lot of debate about him and his leadership.”

While the painting itself was destroyed, a painted study of Churchill — created by Sutherland in preparation for the infamous birthday portrait — had been on display at the UK’s Blenheim Palace in April, in the room where Churchill was born 150 years ago. Sutherland gave the study to his friend Alfred Hecht, who kept it for the rest of his life before gifting it to the current owner. After its stint at the palace, it travelled to Sotheby’s in New York and London ahead of it’s first ever auction on June 6, where it fetched £660,000 ($842,490); lower than it’s estimate of £800,000 ($1,024,000), but still the second highest price for a portrait of Churchill.

“(Sutherland) caught him in a much more relaxed, intimate way,” Zlattinger said of the study, a small canvas painted in oils. “It’s a very different depiction to the (later) painting which obviously Churchill didn’t like and was later destroyed.”

Controlling the narrative

Churchill was far from the only leader to micromanage his image, though; rulers have been controlling and falsifying their images for centuries. Sculptures of Ancient Egyptian pharaohs were stylized in ways to demonstrate their power. The female pharaoh Hatshepsut of the Eighteenth Dynasty diverted from reality completely by having herself depicted with a male torso.

In the UK, Queen Elizabeth I is perhaps the most obvious example of a ruler distorting their image. Robert Blyth, Senior Curator of World and Maritime History at Royal Museums Greenwich, told CNN that after her 40s Elizabeth “simply didn’t age”. In The Rainbow Portrait, one of her most famous paintings, any wrinkles a woman in her 60s might have had are carefully smoothed over.

Queen Victoria, crowned more than 250 years after Elizabeth, also used painting to disguise her age, though the academic Ira B. Nadel wrote that her interest in photography eventually made her “intolerant of idealized or inaccurate portraits.”

Blyth explains that, like Churchill, “a touch of vanity” drove monarchs’ tightly controlled image; “Who would want to have their portrait painted and look exactly as they do?”, he joked. However, leaders also needed to provide political stability. Elizabeth I was “the end of the Tudor line”, Blyth noted. “The idea of her image reflecting any frailty would have caused suspicion.”

Dr Caroline Rae, an associate lecturer in History of Art at University College London, agreed. “It was a period of big changes, people being beheaded,” she told CNN. “Mortality is something which causes instability. (Elizabeth) knows things are maybe not as stable as one might think. She’s in a precarious position.”

Altering public perceptions

Churchill himself faced political precarity. An already tumultuous career landed him in Downing Street during the Second World War, but he was voted out almost as soon as it was over. He did become Prime Minister for a second time in 1951, but his Conservative Party only had a 17-seat majority and, in April 1955, six months after the birthday portrait debacle, Churchill resigned over ill health.

“There was the Suez crisis happening, and Stalin had died in 1953, so there was a lot of stuff going on,” Zlattinger said.

“His health and political position at that time contributed to him being particularly controlling about how that portrait was created and perceived,” Bryn Sayles, Head of Sale, Modern & Post-War British Art at Sotheby’s, told CNN. “But even on earlier commissions, Churchill was quite famously a very tricky sitter and wanted to be depicted in a particular way. For instance, he made sculptor Jacob Epstein take out a bit of flab from underneath his chin (in a work), so from the beginning, Churchill understood the importance of his image as a politician and was very clear about how he felt that image should be presented to the public.”

Historic photographs of the UK’s royal family were also regularly altered, however, not everyone was happy about it. Swiss historian Alexis Schwarzenbach reported that Queen Elizabeth, wife of King George VI and mother of Queen Elizabeth II, returned her 50th birthday photo to photographer Cecil Beaton in 1950, with instructions to reduce the amount of retouching done to her lips and chin. Just four years later, Churchill’s very different reaction to his own ‘imperfections’ led to the scene now immortalized in “The Crown” — a factor which Sayles explains has ironically piqued buyers’ interests in owning his portraits.

“After “The Crown” episode and Gary Oldman’s portrayal of Churchill in the “Darkest Hour” movie, we literally had new collectors coming in the market looking for Churchill paintings because there was a renewed interest in him.”

While Churchill certainly would not have appreciated fresh attention on his hated portrait, buyers appetite for the study proves that the legacy of one of the UK’s most famous leaders is far from over yet.

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