NOT WITHOUT HONOR :

Winston Churchill, Graham Sutherland (1954) (Jonathan Jones, November 3, 2001, The Guardian)

Artist: Graham Sutherland (1903-1980), one of the neo-romantic painters who dominated British art during the second world war and its aftermath. Sutherland's style, thorny, charred, tinged with wintry colours, is visibly influenced by Picasso and Matisse - yet unmistakably British, harking back to the great landscape painters of the early 19th century. [...]

Subject: [...] The war leader's final period of power was marked by dwindling health and, in 1955, he retired. Sutherland was commissioned by both Houses of Parliament to paint a full-length portrait of Churchill in 1954, for which this is a study. The finished painting was presented to Churchill. It was destroyed by his wife Clementine.

Distinguishing features: The destruction of Sutherland's painting is one of the most notorious cases of a subject disliking their portrait. This painted sketch of Churchill's head, a study for the lost, full-length painting, suggests why. It's not simply that Sutherland's modernist tendencies irked the conservative tastes of the Sunday painter prime minister. This is a very unhappy painting. Old, grumpy, with an anger that no longer seems leavened by the humour and verbal creativity of the Churchill of legend, this is a reactionary curmudgeon surrounded by the shades of night.

"But Jesus, said unto them, A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house." Mark 6:4. Posted by Orrin Judd at September 2, 2002 6:28 AM