Finding yourself in opposition in the House of Commons can be uncomfortable for those who once led the nation, especially for someone also credited with a vital military victory. So it was for Winston Churchill. But in 1949 he was consoled with the extraordinary gift of a French impressionist masterpiece: Claude Monet’s depiction of the Palace of Westminster, wreathed in heavy mists.
This generous present, now worth many millions, was accompanied by a note to Churchill wishing that “the fog that shrouds Westminster”, ruled then by Clement Attlee’s Labour party, would soon lift.
The hazy study of the facade of Westminster over the River Thames, completed in 1902, is now to be one of the stars of a landmark exhibition, Monet and London, that will reunite many of the impressionist’s most famous images of London for the first time in 120 years. The former prime minister’s picture is one of only two Monets in British ownership featured in the show at the Courtauld gallery on the Strand next month and it has been newly restored for display, with the removal of a layer of yellowing varnish, applied later to the canvas.
“Churchill’s love of Monet dates right back to when he was first studying painting himself in the 1920s, after he was tutored by the portraitist John Singer Sargent, who had done a picture of his mother,” said Katherine Carter, curator at Chartwell, the politician’s former home in Kent. “Sargent had suggested Churchill start out by copying other great artists, to learn their techniques. I think he went on to have the most fun recreating the style of Monet and the other impressionists. He once described the process as ‘a joyride in a paintbox’. ”
His London painting, which now belongs to The National Trust, as custodians of Chartwell, was given to Churchill as “a very small token of my gratitude for your friendship” by literary agent Emery Reves, who knew he loved Monet. It had been painted on the French artist’s last visit to London and is also suspected to be the one described in a diary entry of February 1900 (he worked on some paintings for years), when Monet wrote of “an extraordinary fog, completely yellow; I think I did not too bad an impression of it; it’s always beautiful”.
Reves had spent a long time searching for a worthy painting to serve as a joint Christmas and 75th birthday present for Churchill. In a letter, held now in the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge, he set out what he called “a true story”, chronicling all his efforts to track down the right canvas.
A painting he had found in Paris had shown the same view, but he later comes across its match at London’s Royal Academy of Arts in an exhibition of French landscapes. “In the Academy the picture looks good, although it is much more sketchy and not so well painted as the one I found in France,” writes Reves. “I discussed this canvas with John Rothenstein of the Tate Gallery who was extremely eulogistic, even using the term “masterpiece”. I wanted to be sure and asked him: ‘Would you hang it in the Tate Gallery?’, to which he most emphatically answered that he would be more than happy to do so. Encouraged by the thought that if you do not like it you can always give it to the Tate, I arranged for the painting to be brought over this morning.”
Churchill did not relish being out of government after 1945 and rarely attended the House of Commons. He is also said to have left the daily management of the Conservative party to others, although he still enjoyed international diplomatic status.
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But his love of painting, both as a hobby and a fan, remained a sustaining pleasure, as it had through his years in power. “Churchill had written about the pleasure that art gave him as far back as 1921 and 1922 in his articles on Painting as a Pastime for Strand magazine,” said Carter. “And during the darker days of the first world war he also said he felt that ‘the muse of painting came to my rescue.’”
Monet’s view upstream towards Westminster is one of many versions of the scene he painted from The Savoy Hotel on the Strand, where his window looked out over Waterloo Bridge on through to Charing Cross and beyond. Coincidentally, it is a river view similar to that from the Courtauld gallery’s home, in nearby Somerset House.
The artist first visited London from France in his early 30s, but it was not until almost three decades later that he tackled a long-held desire to recreate the effects of fog on the Thames. The artist worked on several canvases at the same time, catching the changing effects of light and colour in the damp, smoky city. “I so love London!” he once effused to the renowned art dealer, René Gimpel, but “without the fog, London wouldn’t be a beautiful city. It’s the fog that gives it magnificent breadth. Those massive regular blocks become grandiose within that mysterious cloak.”