![]() Sutherland considered the destruction of his painting an act of vandalism, but when one considers that portraits, particularly official ones for public display, have always been a combination of visual record and propaganda, it is perhaps unsurprising that a likeness the subject did not consider flattering should have been suppressed. Word came that this was not the first Churchill portrait his wife saw fit to condemn: those by Paul Maze and Walter Sickert also disappeared under her watch. Did the British Parliament commission Graham Sutherland to paint a full-length portrait of Sir Winston Churchill in 1954 as a way of giving the then. Lady Churchill had hidden it in the cellar at Chartwell at her request, the Churchills’ private secretary, Grace Hamblin, had it removed and secretly burned on a bonfire. It was destroyed shortly thereafter, with news of its obliteration emerging only in 1978. ![]() The work was destined for permanent display in the Houses of Parliament after Churchill’s death, but it was initially given to him as a gift. One of his political opponents described it as ‘a beautiful work’, while an ally dismissed it as ‘disgusting’. The presentation was to be televised, which meant Churchill was obliged to compliment the painting, though he did so with faint (one might say feint) praise, saying that it displayed ‘force and candour’ and was ‘a remarkable example of modern art’. Sutherland received 1,000 guineas in compensation for the painting, a sum funded by donations from members of the House of Commons and House of Lords. He was persuaded only with great difficulty to accept the portrait at the ceremony in order to avoid causing offence. In 1954, the English artist Graham Sutherland was commissioned to paint a full-length portrait of Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill. Ten days before the official presentation, he wrote to Sutherland, rejecting the painting and declaring that the ceremony would not include it. On seeing a photograph of it, he called it ‘malignant … filthy’. Ap10:00 pm (Updated J5:16 pm) A controversial portrait of Sir Winston Churchill, which the war leader loathed when it was unveiled on his 80th birthday, could be exhumed. While Lady Churchill was said to have remarked that it looked ‘really quite alarmingly like him’, and Churchill’s son, Randolph, thought it made his father look ‘disenchanted’, the sitter himself hated it at once. The result, when it was revealed on Novemto Clementine Churchill, was not a smashing success. Incredibly, this picture was viewed 966 times on. Churchill reluctantly accepts Graham Sutherland’s portrait in Westminster Hall in November 1954 Sutherland did a good many peparatory sketches too - I hope to post some of them shortly.
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