Andrew Marr on Churchill: Blood, Sweat and Oil Paint

He was a giant of politics and war.

The inspirational leader through Britain's darkest hours.

We shall fight on the beaches.

We shall fight on the landing grounds.

We shall fight in the fields

and in the streets.

Soldier, statesman,

builder of walls,

smoker of endless cigars,

but, above all, history's insatiable communicator

who poured out countless books, articles and speeches.

But there's another Churchill.

The private Churchill.

The Churchill of silences

and that's not the Churchill of the grand house at Chartwell.

That's the Churchill of a much humbler little place

in the grounds just below the house -

the painting studio, where he painted and fell, at last, silent.

For almost 50 years, painting was Churchill's private passion.

He was a man besotted, as I am,

by challenges of colour, composition and creativity.

When he was painting, he was completely engrossed

in what he was doing.

He found this thing, this pastime,

that sort of really electrified him.

There are two obvious questions.

First, why did Churchill paint quite so much?

He left us more canvases than many full-time professional artists.

And, second, was he any good?

This is the story of that other hidden Churchill

and the under-examined role that painting

played in his extraordinary life.

BELL RINGS

If you want to understand Winston Churchill,

Britain's greatest Prime Minister,

then his family home in Kent is a good place to start.

Chartwell was his refuge from public life

and nowhere was more small private

than his painting studio in the garden.

This is a building built completely of windows.

There's the real windows all around us,

flooding us with light and beautiful views,

but there are also scores, if not hundreds, of oil paintings.

Pictures all over them.

Each one, a window into an aspect of Churchill's personality.

If you want to inhale the essence of Churchill,

this is the place to do it,

not a library or a grand public building.

This is Churchill confronting himself

and we are surrounded by the paraphernalia

of the private Churchill.

His cigars, his whisky,

his painting coat, still stained

with the oil paint and the turpentine

he was rubbing off from the brushes,

and, on the easel here, is a painting of the goldfish pond,

one of his favourite subjects.

He signed it but it's not really finished

or, if it's finished, it's remarkably loose.

David Hockney always said, "Painting's an old man's game,"

and there's Churchill, the old man,

painting more loosely than he ever did before.

The Chartwell studio is more or less as Churchill left it

at the time of his death

and these paintings are just a fraction

of his prodigious output as an artist.

He only took up painting in middle age

but he produced more than 500 canvases

during the last 50 years of his life

and pictures like these, whatever their quality as art,

give an unexpected glimpse into the mind and, at times, even the soul

of this complex and conflicted character.

There are two kinds of painting,

looking around me in this room, really.

There are the exuberant, colourful,

happiness-filled, dancing paintings of places.

Lots and lots of colour, lots of water, lots of light dancing around.

This is a very, very boisterous, fundamentally optimistic man

who had a thirst for life and a thirst for colour,

but there are also very dark paintings

and they tend to be the portraits.

You get bright landscapes, dark people

and none of the portraits is quite as dark

as the one that hangs over the entire room staring down at us

and it's a small, very, very early painting of Churchill by Churchill.

Painted in late 1915 when Churchill was 40 years old,

his self-portrait reveals a man coming to terms

with harrowing experiences in the First World War.

This is a thin, haggard, exhausted man

surrounded by darkness, staring out at us.

A dark night of the soul,

and this gives us, I think, a big clue

as to why Churchill did any of this at all. Why he painted.

There it is.

He'd only been painting for a few months when he made this picture.

It was a creative response to a crisis in his political fortunes.

A few months earlier, he'd been First Lord of the Admiralty,

a government minister with a central role

in Britain's conduct of the First World War.

In the spring of 1915, he championed the plan

to break the deadlock of the trenches

by opening a second front against Turkey to the East.

The so-called Dardanelles Campaign ended in complete disaster.

More than 200,000 Allied troops lost their lives

and Churchill rightly took some of the blame.

He resigned from the government

and enlisted to fight on the Western front.

It was in the brief interlude before visiting the hell of Flanders

that Churchill, encouraged by his family and friends,

began painting for the first time since his childhood.

This was one of his first attempts.

A peaceful, sunlit image for a man who was close to despair,

but look at those trees.

A premonition, perhaps, of shell bursts?

When he travelled to France in November 1915,

Churchill's paintbox came, too.

Here's a really interesting little picture

which is not at all what it seems.

It appears to be a sunny scene.

There's a light blue sky, clouds scudding across it,

a rosy little village lit by the sunlight, very pretty,

and some greenery in the foreground.

Then you look closer.

Those are not badly painted clouds, those are shell bursts.

That is not an inadequately painted church spire,

that is a shattered church spire

and, all over the village, there are ugly, black holes made by shellfire.

This was painted by Winston Churchill in 1916,

right on the front line,

in a little Belgian village the British army called Plug Street,

so he was sitting there, presumably in his helmet, at his easel,

with shellfire bursting around him

and he wasn't in a sunny mood at all.

According to his fellow officers, he was in a foul mood,

so this is a painting by a man starting to paint

but the strangest thing about this is this -

that just ten miles away, there's another group of soldiers,

the Bavarians, and there's another loner,

also not having a good war,

also trying to draw and paint to keep himself sane

but, in his case, less successfully so,

because his name was Adolf Hitler.

Churchill's family were convinced that this new hobby

helped him to cope with the pressures of high office

and frontline fighting

and that makes sense to me.

I've drawn and painted in a cheerfully incompetent way

all of my life

but the healing effects of drenching yourself

in the difficult, intricate task of making marks on canvas and paper

have become especially apparent to me since I had a major stroke

little more than two years ago.

Survey Churchill's life

and, lurking in the shadows

alongside the man's ardour and courage,

there's an often haunting anxiety

or the spectre of depression,

what he called his Black Dog.

I can smell it here in his beloved home at Chartwell.

The house feels a little cold.

A little quiet.

It's February, it's quite dark, it's wet outside,

so maybe not surprisingly,

but there isn't a great sense of triumph or warmth about this house.

It's not the house, I don't think, of a man who felt

that he was triumphal and lionlike,

however much he may have appeared to be so from the outside.

Humans are the animal which makes.

The wielding of power is an abstract and very strange kind of making.

The politician, particularly in wartime, makes decisions.

He scrawls his name and creates mayhem.

It's interesting that, at moments of stress throughout his life,

Churchill escaped to another kind of making,

one that's so much simpler and, in a way, more innocent.

Painting for him, was often the way to fling open the shutters

and let the sunshine back in.

Painting, to my grandfather, was a lifesaver.

I really believe this.

I think it got him through some very dark moments

and the thing about painting and anything else sort of creative

is that you can't think about anything else while you're doing it.

I mean, this was something he could...

Absolutely would take him into another world and he loved it.

I mean, he so enjoyed it. It wasn't just an escape,

it was also a huge pleasure.

Churchill's hogs' hair paintbrush

had helped him through the trials of war

and it stayed very close to hand throughout the 1920s.

The energy he threw into relaunching his political career

was matched by the thrill of his new passion for art.

He called these pictures daubs

but that self-deprecation hid a growing fascination

with the technical challenges of painting.

Churchill characteristically downplayed

the seriousness of his painting.

He talks about it as a friend who makes few undue demands,

but I think we should look, instead, at how he behaved

and that tells a different story because he cultivated friendships

with some of the most remarkable and important painters of his age.

He hung around their studios and learned their techniques

and had them to tea and talked to them relentlessly

and, if you are interested in painting, as I am,

and you have friends who are proper painters, as I do,

and you talk to them, it is a revelation.

You are introduced into a golden, intense, passionate world

which everybody there takes completely seriously

and I think, all his life, Churchill took painting completely seriously

and his friendships, above all, show that.

Churchill's oddly minimalist painting

Tea in the Dining Room at Chartwell from 1927

provides a snapshot of his fashionable, aristocratic,

creative social circle at the time.

There's the Roaring Twenties beauty Diana Mitford,

Churchill's favourite scientist FA Lindemann,

his wife Clementine

and, beside Churchill, the artist Walter Sickert.

Now, I don't suppose anybody hung around with anybody else

during the 1920s and '30s

but Churchill hung around a lot with painters

and very substantial painters, too.

Very substantial painters.

He loved their company and he just felt at ease with them

because they understood what he would was trying to do,

which was a serious thing.

Walter Sickert was one of several artists

Churchill became friendly with during the 1920s.

Born in Germany, Sickert moved to England as a child.

He was in his 50s when he first met Churchill

and a hugely influential figure in British painting.

As a member of the Camden Town school of painters,

he was a champion of aggressive social realism.

So it sounded an unlikely friendship.

The well-connected, aristocratic politician

and the controversial artist

fascinated by the grubbier corners of urban life,

but the two men clicked

and Sickert taught Churchill several new techniques

to improve his painting,

including the use of a slide projector or magic lantern

to help him set out a composition on the canvas.

So, all I'm doing here is I'm using the projected image,

the photograph with the magic lantern, projected onto the canvas

and I'm using that to trace the outline of the view.

Giving me a shortcut to the final painting.

I will then fill it all in.

It's a technique that the innovative English painter Walter Sickert

taught Churchill.

Now, you may regard it simply as cheating

and I can completely understand why,

however, this is a form of shortcut

which, as David Hockney has reminded us recently,

was used by artists throughout history.

A simple lens projecting an image onto a canvas to speed things up.

We know that Vermeer used it. Caravaggio certainly used it.

So did many other great artists and so did Churchill.

Why? Above all, because it allowed him to cut to the chase

and the part of oil painting which he particularly adored,

which is the great globs of gooey paint,

the colour, the impasto, the stench, the smacking it on.

Using this allowed him to get to the fun part more quickly.

That's as much I can do with that. It's very interesting.

It's not that good, you know, because you've got your own shadow

and you can't see the detail very clearly but that's...

That gives the impression.

That would then become a painting quite quickly, I think.

Churchill was eager to learn

from every leading artist he could get his hands on,

cramming in the basics of an art school education

between Cabinet meetings or foreign visits.

Sir Paul Lavery, Paul Mays, William Orpen

and, the greatest of them all, Sir William Nicholson

were the cream of England's art establishment,

pioneers of a distinctive new style of painting

and they shared their secrets with this unlikely student.

In the early 20th century,

there were a group of specifically English painters

who emphasised the skills of draughtsmanship

and the techniques of brush

over quite sophisticated, subtle effects

on glass and pewter and flowers

and their paintings tend to be very quiet in their effect.

Introspective, completely different from the rather exhibitionist

and much more colourful and muscular paintings in France at the same time

and these guys were friends of Churchill

and it's very interesting that it is the subtle, sophisticated

quiet, introspective, almost depressive skills

of the painterly English painters

that first kick him off as a painter himself.

He surrounded himself with some of the, really, most superb painters

that Britain produced at that period.

I'm thinking of Orpen and people like that.

He measured himself against the best.

I think measuring them is not necessarily the right word.

He felt, in their company, great happiness

because they respected him as an artist,

and that was the best thing that happened to him, I believe.

The most important to Churchill,

because they became intimate friends,

I think that's a fair point, is William Nicholson.

He stayed at Chartwell for a considerable time

and Churchill so respected him

and they, of course, painted together.

They did, and Nicholson,

one of the loosest but most brilliant, fluid painters

of that period by far,

somebody who's coming back into his own at the moment...

He is, thank God. Yes.

It's interesting. There are some still lifes by Churchill

that have that direct influence of Nicholson.

Their greyness and their silver-ness and so on. Very beautiful.

It was Nicholson's approach to painting

that was the most important thing.

Very serious

yet light-hearted, I suspect.

The seriousness with which Churchill studied the craft of painting

was a constant throughout his life.

A creative intensity that only close friends and family ever got to see,

if they were lucky.

You were with your grandfather when he was painting.

What was going on?

When he was painting, he was completely preoccupied

and he, generally, if he was outside, he'd have his big hat on

and he would be totally engrossed in what he was doing

and he didn't really welcome anyone much around

so, if you were there, you kept your distance.

The studio was pretty much out of bounds

in the same way that my grandfather's study was

and we were not allowed in there

because those were the places where he worked

and he hated being disturbed.

I mean, right through his life,

there are famous stories of him bellowing at people

who disturbed him while he was working

and that included his loved but infuriating grandchildren.

Oil painting, unlike, say, watercolours,

oil painting requires complete concentration,

physical, because it's a physical act.

Churchill was a very physical man.

He played golf,

he hunted, he rode horses

and this was what oil painting gave him.

It allowed him to be distracted.

It was a total, absorbing pursuit.

Throwing him, his whole self, into it, mind and body.

Absolutely, you've got it. Exactly.

He painted whenever and wherever he could.

At home, in his studio,

or, best of all, out in the open under a warming sun.

In 1920, Churchill made the first of many painting trips

to the south of France

and discovered a new way of looking at the world.

For generations, the British upper classes have had to deal

with the almost unimaginable horror of the British winter,

and they've dealt with it, by and large, by moving south.

From Edwardian times right the way through

to the new Elizabethans of the 1950s,

in their hundreds and thousands,

they flocked down here to the south of France

for its dappled sunlight and it's azure waters

like so many ungainly, dark migratory birds

and, in that, at least,

Winston Churchill was absolutely a man of his time and his class.

The lush and dramatic landscapes of the Mediterranean

were a world away from the calmer, gentler scenes at home.

They demanded a new palette of colours

and they inspired a new direction in Churchill's approach to his craft.

His first influences had been the understated English artists,

but, now, Churchill took inspiration from the European

impressionists and postimpressionists,

Manet and Monet, Cezanne and Matisse.

According to Churchill, they had

"brought to art a new draught of joie de vivre."

"The beauty of their work is instinct with gaiety and floats in the sparkling air."

This is one of his early efforts to emulate their success.

A view of Mimizin in south-west France,

which reminds me, slightly, of an early Paul Dufy.

The landscapes were spectacular but the romance of the impoverished artist

never much appealed to Winston Churchill.

When he painted abroad,

he always made sure the digs were up to scratch.

And this was one of his favourites, the Villa La Pausa,

once the home of Coco Chanel.

Churchill came from the well-off aristocracy.

After all, he was born in Blenheim Palace

but he never had very much ready cash of his own.

He always dreamed of being a millionaire.

Well, for decades, he could come down to the south of France

and mingle with those who really were.

He'd leave behind the problems of freezing London,

which may feel familiar.

He was dealing with Ireland, Russia, Iraq,

and he'd throw it all to one side and he'd come down here

and he'd loiter about with the likes of Coco Chanel,

Aristotle Onassis, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor,

Noel Coward.

These days we tend to be quite critical of politicians

who, after they've left office, hang around with the rich and famous.

Well, for decades, Churchill did exactly that in the South of France.

Eat your heart out, Tony Blair.

It's not hard to understand the appeal of the Med

but, for Churchill, I think it went a little deeper than just

the glitz and the luxury of places like this.

Churchill's imagination was, of course, first and foremost verbal.

The great thinker, the great writer, the great speaker.

But, for an intensely verbal man,

he also had a strongly visual imagination.

Why did he keep coming down to the south of France?

For the sun on his face, yes, of course.

For the glamorous friends, up to a point.

But, above all, he came here, I think,

for the extraordinary, intense, saturated colours,

which fed his imagination as nothing else could.

If you want to see how that works, you can turn to

the only novel the young Churchill wrote.

It's intensely romantic, quite interesting, not very good

and it's called Savrola.

He wrote it in his early twenties long before he began to paint,

but the novel is full of clues to a romantic sensibility

which later expressed itself on canvas.

The hero of the novel,

a barely disguised version of Churchill himself,

is a man of action who fights a dictator who is blind to beauty.

At a key moment in the story,

he retreats to his study to look at Jupiter in the night sky

"At last he rose, his mind still far away from Earth."

"Another world, a world more beautiful,

"a world of boundless possibilities,

"enthralled his imagination."

And then, obviously,

he and the central female character in the story fall in love.

"With her, it was as if the rising sunbeam

"had struck the rainbow from the crystal prism,"

"or had flushed the snow peak with rose, orange and violet."

This novel is a young man's fantasy, florid and melodramatic,

but the romantic sensibility it reveals

was part of Churchill's make-up to the end.

I think painting was one way of tapping into it,

especially when he immersed himself

in the shimmering light of the Mediterranean.

Churchill adored the south of France,

it was his personal playground.

But the Cote D'Azure that Churchill loved

has now mostly been destroyed.

Too much appalling development, too much money, too many people.

There are only a few places, like here on the Loup river,

which are, more or less exactly, as Churchill knew them.

Just a few miles north of Cannes,

the Loup river offered Churchill a challenging juxtaposition

of harsh, textured cliff faces and still, reflective water.

Pictures like this spring from the same romantic imagination

on display in Churchill's early novel,

but where his prose was overcooked and sentimental,

the painting is, in my opinion, deft and sophisticated.

Taken to the Loup river to film, I've decided to draw myself

but a broader subject.

To be honest, working here with pencils,

I find water almost impossible to draw.

I've chosen a drawing subject which is technically quite difficult.

Not because of the overall shape, that's straightforward.

There's a cliff and there are trees coming down into the river bubbling through.

But because of the complexity and subtlety of the colour here.

It's still nearly winter. There aren't many leaves on the trees.

Everything is a kind of gungy brown or a slimy green.

I'm drawing out the colours, and every time I look at it again, I see more colours.

It's a complicated business.

I haven't completely messed it up this time. That's all I'll say.

It's not great but it's not a total mess-up.

What's interesting is that this is a difficult place to paint.

I'm surrounded by running water, dappled colours, speckle, flash.

He chose hard subjects.

He once said that painting was like taking a paintbox

off on a joyride, to lift the blood and tears of the morning.

Well, if so, all I can say is that Churchill's paintbox was a 4x4,

which he drove to the hardest places possible. The most obscure.

The toughest subjects.

I'm half happy. Which, for me, is quite a lot. Hmm.

Churchill painted the Loup river several times.

He came here again and again.

I think this version is the best.

He gifted it to the Tate Gallery after a meeting

with its director John Rothenstein, in his studio at Chartwell.

Surrounded by Churchill's paintings,

the two men discussed the importance of art.

And Churchill turned to Rothenstein and he said,

"If it weren't for painting, I couldn't live."

"I couldn't bear the strain of things."

Horse's mouth.

Churchill rarely spoke

so directly about the emotional importance of his art.

He only wrote publicly about it once,

in an essay called Painting As A Pastime,

published shortly after that first expedition to France.

The essay celebrates the excitement and satisfaction of making art,

sensations that nourished him

during a series of incredibly difficult government jobs in the 1920s.

He painted this calm interior in 1921,

the same year that he oversaw

the partition of Ireland as Colonial Secretary.

A task that earned Churchill many enemies in his own party.

And this fiery seascape was composed

when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer,

a post he held for five years

during the upheavals of the general strike and economic depression.

When the Tories were voted out in 1929, Churchill lost his job.

With enemies on all sides of the House of Commons,

he thought his career was over.

The 1920s had been all about excitement, and colour, and light

but, now, Churchill's fortunes demanded a more sombre palette.

He was entering the decade that's been called his "wilderness years."

This is the period when Churchill's production as a painter starts to really accelerate.

About half the paintings we have from him now

come from this time, which is very interesting,

if you look at what else is going on in his life.

In his political life he's made bad choices.

He's a bit of a political dinosaur, virtually an outcast.

In his other life as a writer, now, I know, none better,

that life as a hack journalist is very, very exciting

but extremely unchancy and febrile and things are going very badly for him in that regard.

Contracts have been cancelled, the money isn't coming in.

He's under huge pressure.

And how is he behaving in this house?

Well, signs of pressure all around.

The brandies and sodas are starting from 11.30 in the morning -

a little bit early, even for me.

And, by the evening, he is knocking himself out with booze -

brandy and soda, whisky, champagne.

Day and night have almost ceased to exist for Churchill at this period.

He will get up in the middle of the night

and dictate to some poor, wretched secretary for three hours at a time.

He's wallowing around in his bath.

He's wandering around this house

dressed either only in a silk kimono,

with a great, big red dragon stitched on the back,

or with no clothes on at all.

He's showing lots of signs of manic, pressured behaviour.

"Never a dull or idle moment," Churchill once wrote.

The 55-year-old outcast now flung his energies into Chartwell.

Winston rolled up his sleeves and he built cottages, walls,

garden rockeries, and even a swimming pool

with his own bare hands.

Described as "restless and meditative"

by friend and politician Harold Nicolson,

Churchill also painted like a demon.

One of his favourite subjects,

of who he painted many times over the years -

the pond in the garden, filled with goldfish.

I have very strong memories of the goldfish pond.

Because it was a great sort of little ceremony.

He used to... After lunch,

he used to walk down to the goldfish pond, with maybe grandchildren,

with Rufus the poodle,

and he'd sit on the edge of the goldfish pond

and he'd bang on the Yorkstone with his stick,

and the goldfish would come rushing over.

And then he'd feed them mealies out of this big box.

He created that space.

There was no goldfish pond when he arrived at Chartwell.

That goldfish pond looked as he wished it to look.

When the family were gone, Churchill would sit and sit and paint.

Perhaps it was the technical challenge

of representing light and shade, water and foliage

that fascinated him most.

Or was there more to it than that?

So this is a very important place to Churchill, this goldfish pond.

And, at first sight, it seems a bit melancholy - it's dark -

and you wonder if there's some kind of connection

between his fascination with this very, very dark green water,

albeit with flashes of golden goldfish in it,

and what's going on in his head at the time.

Because it is the reverse

of the kind of sunny, sunlit, easy landscapes

he liked to paint in France, for instance.

This painting of the pond was done in 1932,

when Churchill was increasingly frustrated

by his marginal role in public life.

Many say it's the best painting that Churchill ever did.

Well, it's technically accomplished and beautifully composed.

It's a mood piece,

which conveys something of the great man's melancholy -

what his daughter in later life

would describe as, "A void in his heart,

"which no achievement or honour could completely fulfil."

There is a black dog swimming in that water.

I'm not drawing water very well at the moment, but, um...

I'm getting there, I guess.

If black dog was the problem, maybe colour was the cure.

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once said of Churchill that,

"He sees history and life as a great Renaissance pageant.

"The units out of which his world is constructed

"are simpler and larger-than-life, painted in primary colours."

That might explain why he loved Marrakesh in Morocco so very much.

In late 1935, Churchill made the first of many visits

to paint in the North African city.

"Sunseeking, rotten and disconsolate,"

as he once described himself in a letter to his wife,

Marrakesh promised him desert adventure

and a trip back in time in primary colours,

a place to absorb his mind and lift his spirits.

PENCIL SCRATCHES

The capacity of art and its making to restore one's mental health

is something that I am coming to understand,

and I'm sure Churchill did too.

I'm really interested in the idea of flow

as the essence of happiness, if you like.

And flow is, we're told,

being engaged with full intensity in something,

doing it as much as you possibly can, as hard as you can,

but something you find difficult, and not easy, but you CAN do.

So, for me, it's drawing.

When I'm doing it, everything else

just dissolves into mere colour and line,

and there is nothing except for colour and line

in the world, ultimately. So that's what it does for me.

I'm sure it was the same for Churchill too.

I wouldn't say that art's kept me sane

but I think, certainly for me,

it's been a very, very important release valve.

When things are going really badly,

there's been too much pressure in personal life

or in professional life, when I think I'm about to go pop,

then, frankly, going back to paints and easels and colours and shapes

helps me hugely - always has.

None of us are Churchill.

We don't quite know what was going on in his mind,

none of us ever will.

But my best guess is that it kept him sane

because it kept him connected to the vibrant,

kind of flickering, iridescent reality of being alive.

It's about looking out and thinking, "I am alive."

You're thinking about the shapes, you're thinking about the colours,

and you're full of awe and amazement.

And his paintings are full of awe and amazement and joie de vivre,

and a sense of being really engaged

in this extraordinary world around you.

And, you know, in a pressured, difficult life,

where you're full of gloom and full of worry and full of angst -

he had these terrible depressions - I think it that is the kind of thing

that can stop you blowing your brains out, frankly.

Painting helped Churchill find a path through his Wilderness Years,

-which is just as well.

-BOMBS WHISTLE AND EXPLODE

Because, of course, history hadn't quite finished with him just yet.

CHURCHILL: I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.

In the past, he'd juggled politics and painting

but, when he became Prime Minister in May 1940, at the age of 65,

Churchill's wartime duties were so intense

that even his private release valve and solace

had to be packed away for the duration.

There was just one occasion during six years of war

when his brushes saw the light of day.

It was the only time in his life

when his private passion for making art

collided with his public role as a politician.

It's 1943.

The World War is on a pivot and, for Britain,

everything depends on the intensity and the strength

of the American alliance.

So what does Churchill do?

He drags President Roosevelt halfway across North Africa,

here to his beloved Marrakesh.

Why?

Because, as he tells the American president, "I have to be with you

"when you first see the sun set on the Atlas Mountains."

This is Churchill's diplomacy at its most personal and intense.

While he's here, he does something

he doesn't do at any other point during the war -

he paints a picture of the Koutoubia Mosque -

a lovely painting -

and he immediately gives it to Roosevelt.

This is not the ordinary kind of gift between leaders.

This is Churchill giving Roosevelt a tiny slice of his own soul -

ultimate soft power.

Of course, in those days, the international art markets

did not exist in quite the way it does today,

and so where is that lovely painting now?

In the collection of Mr and Mrs Brad Pitt.

After the war had been won,

Churchill returned to Marrakesh many times,

and always with his paints, which were now out of storage for good.

His first visit came

as a new Labour government was settling in back home.

The wartime Prime Minister had been unceremoniously booted from office

in a general election that was one of the most celebrated upsets

in British political history.

Exhausted and dejected, he decamped here to the Mamounia Hotel,

with his entourage of family and staff.

Alongside cases of Pol Roger champagne and whisky,

frames, canvases and easels would be shipped out from London.

And his hotel room would become a temporary painting studio,

again and again, many times over during the next years of his life.

So what you get from a place like this

is your high balcony and a huge view,

stretching for probably 30 or 40 miles into the distance.

And you've got the Atlas Mountains in the far distance.

I can exactly see why Churchill enjoyed this balcony

and this particular view.

The mountains are kind of...

There's a kind of sense of Alpine cleanliness and fresh air.

It's a bracing view, I guess.

It opened the door to the total involvement of his mind.

He was a very intelligent man.

Total involvement of his mind in making a picture,

which was a very complicated thing.

And not only that,

the total involvement, more or less, of his body.

Cos, when you paint in oils, you need to use the whole of your body

and, to be a successful painter, you need to use the whole of your mind.

This is the first time I've painted in oil since my stroke.

Um...

Obviously, oils are kind of harder, physically,

than watercolours or drawing, because you got so much gunk.

I'll make a massive amount of mess today, I'm sure.

I'm effectively one-handed -

I can't hold the canvas and paint at the same time,

so my marks are going to be quite...

basic and simple and brutal, if you like.

And it's a very complicated scene,

with lots and lots of subtlety about it.

Am I going to be able to get that subtlety

or am I just going to make a mess?

Very good question.

He loved the South of France and he loved Morocco.

He said he wanted to go somewhere "paintable and bathable"

when he went on holiday.

And, very often, he did find that.

The line of the mountains is quite simple.

You've got a lot of trees, a lot of palm trees,

a lot of movement going on. Battlements.

The pleasure he got out of it was almost as a craft.

You know, the technique of putting the paint onto the canvas.

He loved the texture of the paint,

the thickness of the paint for different effects.

It was working with his hands.

After his monumental efforts in the war,

Churchill had become surplus to national requirements.

Morocco was just one of the many places

he travelled to in the late 1940s,

as he embarked on a globetrotting life of semi-rejection.

From Miami Beach and the Mediterranean

to Belgium and Jamaica,

he was always on the move and always painting.

Was he coming to terms with the end of his career,

or was he recharging his batteries

before he launched himself into it yet again?

There comes a time in the life of every painting

when it kind of finishes itself, when it announces to you

that, the more you paint, the worse it's now going to get.

I'm thinking I made some good decisions.

I've got a very strong vertical, a very strong horizontal.

It's a very simple design. And, in this case, it's not bad.

It's not a shameful painting. I wish I'd worked harder

before I started to put on the big slabs of colour.

Am I happy with this picture?

No, I'm not.

Have I ever been happy with any picture I've done?

Never.

It seems Churchill was never really satisfied

with his paintings, either.

He was certainly very reluctant to show them in public.

But, in 1947, when Churchill was in his mid-70s,

the president of the Royal Academy, Sir Alfred Munnings,

persuaded him to enter two of his paintings,

including this view of Winter Sunshine at Chartwell

for the Academy's Summer Exhibition.

Churchill submitted the pictures under a pseudonym.

He wanted them to be accepted and hung on merit,

not because of who he was.

The subject, of course, of the picture

might have been a bit of a giveaway!

At any rate, the following year,

Churchill exhibited three pictures at the Academy under his own name.

The Royal Academy Of Arts is the pinnacle, the bastion,

the palazzo of the official British art world.

All up and down the country, in the 1940s and '50s, as now,

hundreds and thousands of amateur painters and sculptors

dream of seeing their work hung here in the Summer Exhibition,

alongside the greats of the day.

And Churchill was no different.

In 1948, he was made an honorary RA -

an almost unique honour for a nonprofessional artist,

and he took great pride and pleasure in this.

But it has to be said that,

characteristically for Churchill, this was a conservative honour.

The RA has never been at the pinnacle,

the forefront of world art.

And Churchill and Sir Alfred Munnings famously discussed here

how much they hated modern art and, in particular,

which of them would most like to kick Mr Picasso up the bum!

PROJECTOR CLICKS

He was enjoying the honours

that often come to great men in retirement.

But Churchill wasn't done with politics yet.

Astonishingly, in 1951, he became Prime Minister for a second time,

and he soldiered on through a full term, despite several strokes.

When he left Number 10 for good in 1955,

Churchill travelled back to the South of France

to paint at the Villa La Pausa.

The former home of Coco Chanel

was now home of Churchill's literary agent, Emery Reves.

In the past, painting had been an antidote to mental turmoil.

Now the challenge was physical instead.

We know that Churchill sat in this more or less exact spot

and painted this more or less exact view -

a great deal better than I'm painting it, I have to say,

but nonetheless... And you can see the attraction -

it is just a riot of vivid colours, exploding to you.

You've got the lovely little Mediterranean town of Menton

right in front of you,

a kind of symphony of pinks and creams and bright white.

La Pausa, for my grandfather, was a haven, in a way.

He was very lucky that he was able to spend so much time there.

And he went there for lunch one day,

and met Wendy and Emery Reves, and obviously expressed such enthusiasm

that they put a whole room at his disposal.

In fact, a whole floor at his disposal, and he used it as his own.

And Wendy Reves would be amazingly helpful,

and she'd invent things for him to paint.

It was a very agreeable, wonderful place for him to be.

I think he was having a marvellous time at an easel.

You know, fighting the paint into submission,

puffing away on his cigar, forgetting the cares of the world.

And having a lovely time with light and landscape,

and it was something he could do wherever he went.

I understand, from personal experience,

the physical challenges of recovering from a stroke.

But, for Churchill, in his mid-70s,

to paint again after all he had been through

speaks volumes for his sheer bloody-mindedness.

He had many faults, but you would never call him a quitter.

Churchill never lost his ambition all his life -

he remained, in his old age,

as determined to change the world as he ever was.

He wanted to get rid of the nuclear bomb,

he wanted to have a new peace treaty with the Soviet Union,

he was full of ambition, and they stopped him doing it.

He was too old, too ill, rambled on too long.

They made him go.

Now, we know what happens when politicians are forced out -

it's always bloody, it's always difficult.

Think of Margaret Thatcher.

Well, Churchill didn't rage.

He didn't sort of try to enter politics.

He didn't make stupid speeches. He carried on.

One of the ways he carried on was simply sitting here, painting.

I mean, he... He had one thing that he could do

that they couldn't take away from him, I suppose.

And it was this.

Besides his family, there was no-one better placed

to understand what art gave to Churchill at this time

than his bodyguard.

PROJECTOR CLICKS

From 1950 until his death, Sergeant Edmund Murray -

ex-Foreign Legion, ex-Metropolitan Police -

travelled everywhere with Churchill.

Murray was a keen amateur painter himself,

and he soon became Churchill's painting assistant as well.

Bill, your father was Churchill's close protection officer

during the 1950s.

Tell us a little bit about him first.

My father was a Metropolitan Police officer,

and he joined Special Branch in 1949. And, er...

he came up for protection duties, and was shortlisted.

I think perhaps because he'd spent seven or eight years

in the French Foreign Legion,

and he could speak French fluently, and also Arabic as well.

So Foreign Legion, French, Arabic.

-But, beyond all of that, he was a painter too.

-He was, yes.

And is it true that he would

actually scope out places for Churchill to paint,

then find the places that Churchill then painted?

Yes, that's right.

He had a camera that was given to him by Sir Winston,

and Dad had to go around the sites and find the right places.

But obviously had to think of security,

and also think of access as well.

Because, certainly in the later years,

Sir Winston wasn't really very mobile.

And they'd paint together, side-by-side, from time to time?

Sometimes.

Usually, that would have been at Chartwell or occasionally abroad.

There was such a lot of equipment to carry around

that, really, there was only enough equipment for Sir Winston to paint,

and not my father.

Right from the early days of my father being the bodyguard,

Sir Winston gave instructions

that no-one else was to set out his paints other than my father

because he knew what Sir Winston wanted, what he needed,

the colours he needed, the equipment he needed.

So that's real luxury for any painter,

to have somebody else lay out the paints,

clean the brushes, sort you out.

-Exactly right, yes.

-Fantastic.

-Yeah, that's true.

And they clearly shared so much.

As a result of which, you have Winston Churchill's paints,

and some of Sir Winston's own brushes.

It's quite moving, because you can still see the gobs of paint

and bits of the brush where he has worn them away

by stabbing and slashing at the canvas.

And his special painting spectacles, and his great painting hat.

His painting hat, one of his painting hats.

Because, certainly in the sunny, sunny climates

of the South of France and Morocco and Jamaica,

the hat was really important and essential.

You wouldn't want to burn your head. It's a very, very fine hat.

It's a little it's too small for my head! "Bighead Marr"!

And, above all, we've got this extraordinary painting here,

which is like an abstract picture.

It's a mysterious, dark, abstract painting,

-but it's actually of the goldfish pond at Chartwell.

-Yes.

Probably in his late 80s,

my father managed to get Sir Winston out

to do one last painting.

And we think it was that one.

It's definitely of the goldfish pond at Chartwell.

By that time, Sir Winston's eyesight had got quite poor.

It's very blurred, it's very streaky. It's a strange painting.

But, at Chartwell, the goldfish ponds are dark.

You can imagine a very, very old man staring through

the sort of dark, turbid waters, down into the flashes of gold.

-It's like a vision of something, isn't it?

-Yeah.

There's something moving.

It's like an old man looking through reality for some brightness beyond.

-But this could be the last painting he ever made?

-I think it is. Yes.

Churchill painted almost to the end.

But it was only after he died in January 1965

that the full extent of his artistic endeavours became clear.

More than 500 canvases -

an extraordinary creative counterpoint

to one of the 20th Century's most extraordinary lives.

Now, you had the great good luck, David, of being the first person

to properly catalogue Churchill's paintings in the 1960s.

What did that teach you about him?

Absolutely knocked me out, and still knocks me out,

if I could use that word,

was the overall sensitivity of this work.

Now, I grew up during the War,

I was well aware of Churchill's, er,

fame as a warrior, as a leader and so on,

and I never expected that sensitivity.

And yet it's through the whole of his art.

I think it's wonderful and still do.

'In late 2014 came a moment that Churchill would have loved.

'Some of his paintings were auctioned at Sotheby's in London.'

He saw himself as a politician and a writer.

He didn't see himself as a painter, particularly,

but he found this thing, this pastime,

that sort of really electrified him.

'You see that spirit in his paintings and you hear it

'in the only public statement he ever made about his art.'

"To restore psychic equilibrium, we should bring into use

"those parts of the mind which direct both eye and hand."

"Painting is complete as a distraction.

"I know of nothing else which, without exhausting the body,

"more completely absorbs the mind."

"One sweep of the palette knife removes the blood

"and tears of a morning."

"Innocent."

"Absorbing."

"Recuperative."

'Now, Churchill's paintings, so revealing of his private

'obsessions, struggles, passions and eccentricities,

'are being taken more seriously than ever.'

Having spent most of my life with them,

I somewhat took them for granted.

You know, I haven't been sitting at home all our lives thinking,

"Gosh, you know, they're valuable," or "They're this..."

They're just my parents' pictures, or grandpapa's pictures,

or pictures by grandpapa, or, erm...

And my knowledge of them to start with was the miniscule end of minor.

'The star lot at Sotheby's, his Goldfish Pond at Chartwell,

'raised almost £2 million.

'It's a price that says as much about Churchill's fame as it does

'about his skill, although he's a much more accomplished painter

'than I'm ever likely to be.

'But it has to be said that the quality or cost of Churchill's

'pictures isn't really the point -

'their value isn't gauged by money or even critical opinion,

'but in understanding what the act of creation meant for him,

'and, by extension, for history.'

No-one could question what he'd put on the canvas.

That was how he saw it.

And that was the way he could show the beautiful things

that he saw around him and at the same time express himself.

I think the paintings are expressive of yet another dimension

to my rather amazing grandfather's extraordinary breadth.

Here is a man who will try anything.

Here is a man of great courage.

You know, give him a blank canvas and he'll have a go.

Erm, he'll sort of fight it into submission.

He genuinely loved it.

In my experience, my grandfather as I knew him

wasn't this great fierce bulldog.

He was a very benign person who loved having us all around,

and so I think that the paintings perhaps come from that side of him.

And as he said,

"I would like to spend my first million years in Heaven painting."

Apart from that showing terrific confidence in what will

happen to him at the Pearly Gates,

erm, er, you know, he absolutely loved it,

and he couldn't spend too much time at the easel.

Now, we all know, don't we, that Churchill liked to deal with

some of the gravest, most serious matters by making jokes about them.

So, for instance...

"Success consists in going from failure to failure

"with undiminished enthusiasm."

Or there's his wartime motto, KBO, "Keep Buggering On."

But, in truth, there comes to all of us at a certain time in life when

the accumulated failures and the mistakes

and the disappointments and the blows, in his case the worst of them

self-inflicted, are so great, that simply keeping going,

getting out of bed in the morning, putting on your clothes

and carrying on becomes a kind of problem.

For all of us in a small way, for Churchill in a grand way.

And the more I look around and the more I read, the surer I am that,

for Churchill, painting was his great secret in all of this.

It was the thing that allowed him to get away from himself, to relax,

to keep going, to say to his ego,

"You push off, I'm busy for a while."

That primal business of simply recording the world around him.

And, therefore, he was still available, still standing,

still courageous, still with zest

and enthusiasm in 1939-1940 to lead this country.

And so, if Churchill saved the country, and he did,

and painting saved Churchill, stopped him from going mad,

what does that say about the importance of painting?