Graham Sutherland’s portrait of Winston Churchill, painted to commemorate the-then Prime Minister’s 80th birthday in 1954, was immortalized in the Netflix show “The Crown.” Alex Bailey/Netflix
“That is not a painting, it’s a humiliation!” Winston Churchill (played by John Lithgow) angrily tells the renowned painter Graham Sutherland (actor Stephen Dillane) in the first season of “The Crown,” Netflix’s six-series dramatization about the English monarchy. Churchill is talking about his own portrait, commissioned to celebrate his 80th birthday, as it is unveiled in London’s Westminster Hall in November 1954.
Churchill goes on to describe his appearance in the painting as “a broken, sagging, pitiful creature,” Sutherland as “a Judas wielding his murderous brush,” and concludes the whole work is “a betrayal of friendship, and an unpatriotic, treacherous, cowardly assault by the individualistic left!”
The episode ends with Churchill’s wife Clementine (played by Harriet Walter) watching it burn on a bonfire outside their home.
Evidently, he was not a fan.
While “The Crown” is not a documentary, it is true that the 80th birthday portrait —described by Churchill as “filthy and malignant” in a letter to his personal doctor — was burned.
“I think he was quite vain about his image,” Andre Zlattinger, Deputy Chairman UK and Head of Modern British & Irish Art at Sotheby’s, explained during a press briefing. “He’d had a stroke in 1953 so for him (how he was perceived) was important at that time. He’d won the election in 1951 by a narrow margin, and there was quite a lot of debate about him and his leadership.”
While the painting itself was destroyed, a painted study of Churchill — created by Sutherland in preparation for the infamous birthday portrait — is now on display at the UK’s Blenheim Palace until April 21, in the room where Churchill was born 150 years ago. Sutherland gave the study to his friend Alfred Hecht, who kept it for the rest of his life before gifting it to the current owner. After its stint at the palace, it is headed for Sotheby’s New York and London, before being auctioned for the first time on June 6 — where it is estimated fetch as much as £800,000 ($997,000).
“(Sutherland) caught him in a much more relaxed, intimate way,” Zlattinger said of the study, a small canvas painted in oils. “It’s a very different depiction to the (later) painting which obviously Churchill didn’t like and was later destroyed.”
Controlling the narrative
Churchill was far from the only leader to micromanage his image, though; rulers have been controlling and falsifying their images for centuries. Sculptures of Ancient Egyptian pharaohs were stylized in ways to demonstrate their power. The female pharaoh Hatshepsut of the Eighteenth Dynasty diverted from reality completely by having herself depicted with a male torso.
In the UK, Queen Elizabeth I is perhaps the most obvious example of a ruler distorting their image. Robert Blyth, Senior Curator of World and Maritime History at Royal Museums Greenwich, told CNN that after her 40s Elizabeth “simply didn’t age”. In The Rainbow Portrait, one of her most famous paintings, any wrinkles a woman in her 60s might have had are carefully smoothed over.
Queen Victoria, crowned more than 250 years after Elizabeth, also used painting to disguise her age, though the academic Ira B. Nadel wrote that her interest in photography eventually made her “intolerant of idealized or inaccurate portraits.”
Blyth explains that, like Churchill, “a touch of vanity” drove monarchs’ tightly controlled image; “Who would want to have their portrait painted and look exactly as they do?”, he joked. However, leaders also needed to provide political stability. Elizabeth I was “the end of the Tudor line”, Blyth noted. “The idea of her image reflecting any frailty would have caused suspicion.”
