Wallace Collection review: Admit it, art snobs, Winston Churchill was a surprisingly decent painter

On the evidence, though, of Winston Churchill: The Painter, he was hardly as bad as all that. On occasion, he was even surprisingly decent (which is something I never thought I’d write), as demonstrated by a room here of Moroccan landscapes – including a view of the Koutoubia Mosque in Marrakech that achieved £8.3m at auction when it was sold by Angelina Jolie in 2021. Painted in 1943, it was the only canvas he produced during the Second World War. He gave it to his friend and fellow wartime leader, US President Franklin D Roosevelt, whom he’d persuaded to accompany him on a trip to Marrakech immediately after the Casablanca Conference (to, as he put it, “see the sunset on the snows of the Atlas Mountains”). According to Bray, Churchill often gifted his paintings to important people, including three consecutive American presidents, as a form of “soft power”.

You can tell that, like many artists before him, Churchill loved painting in North Africa, where, while working en plein air, he would attract a curious crowd. (He visited Marrakech six times between 1935 and 1959, and often stayed at La Mamounia, the opulent hotel which offered a panorama of the “Red City”.) His Moroccan compositions may lack the blazing audacity of, say, those by Henri Matisse, but their combinations of dusky pinks, cool lavenders and greens still satisfy. Sure, he had a tourist’s eye and was drawn to conventional subjects, such as a gate in Marrakech’s ancient ramparts. But he also left behind the city in search of original motifs. The Todhra Gorge, Morocco (1951) depicts dramatic limestone formations like vast, distorted skulls within a river canyon in the eastern Atlas Mountains. It’s pleasing, coherent and proficient.

Although stick figures populate some of Churchill’s Moroccan views, Bray and his co-curator, Lucy Davis, wisely omit his paintings of people, which can appear ham-fisted. Instead, they present an attractive selection of almost 60 of his still lifes and landscapes, including serene, sun-soaked vistas of holiday destinations in Italy and along the Côte d’Azur (as well as in Morocco). This subject matter may reflect the fact that painting for Churchill was a way to relieve strain – which he wrote about brilliantly in his essay Painting as a Pastime. (He found similar solace in bricklaying.) His compositions in this mode are easy on the eye and inoffensive. The best examples are preoccupied with capturing complex reflections on the surface of water.