SAT写作素材之Winston Churchill :His Other Life

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Winston Churchill :His Other Life

My father, Winston Churchill, began his love affair with painting in his 40s,

amid disastrous circumstances. As First Lord of the Admiralty in 1915, he was

deeply involved in a campaign in the Dardanelles that could have shortened the

course of a bloody world war. But when the mission failed, with great loss of

life, Churchill paid the price, both publicly and privately. He was removed from

the admiralty and effectively sidelined.

Overwhelmed by the catastrophe — “I thought he would die of grief,” said his

wife, Clementine —he retired with his family to Hoe Farm, a country retreat in

Surrey. There, as Churchill later recalled, “The muse of painting came to my

rescue!”

Wandering in the garden one day, he chanced upon his sister-in-law sketching

with watercolors. He watched her for a few minutes, then borrowed her brush and

tried his hand. The muse had cast her spell!

Churchill soon decided to experiment with oils. Delighted with this

distraction from his dark broodings, Clementine rushed off to buy whatever

paints she could find.

For Churchill, however, the next step seemed difficult as he contemplated

with unaccustomed nervousness the blameless whiteness of a new canvas. He

started with the sky and later described how “very gingerly I mixed a little

blue paint on the palette, and then with infinite precaution made a mark about

as big as a bean upon the affronted snow-white shield. At that moment the sound

of a motor car was heard in the drive. From this chariot stepped the gifted wife

of Sir John Lavery .”

“ ‘Painting!’ she declared. ‘But what are you hesitating about? Let me have

the brush — the big one.’ Splash into the turpentine, wallop into the blue and

the white, frantic flourish on the palette, and then several fierce strokes and

slashes of blue on the absolutely cowering canvas.”

At that time, John Lavery— a Churchill neighbor and celebrated painter— was

tutoring Churchill in his art. Later, Lavery said of his unusual pupil: “Had he

chosen painting instead of statesmanship, I believe he would have been a great

master with the brush.”

In painting, Churchill had discovered a companion with whom he was to walk

for the greater part of the years that remained to him. After the war, painting

would offer deep solace when, in 1921, the death of the mother was followed two

months later by the loss of his and Clementine’s beloved three-year-old

daughter, Marigold. Battered by grief, Winston took refuge at the home of

friends in Scotland, finding comfort in his painting. He wrote to Clementine: “I

went out and painted a beautiful river in the afternoon light with crimson and

golden hills in the background. Alas I keep feeling the hurt of the Duckadilly

(Marigold’s pet name).”

Historians have called the decade after 1929, when the Conservative

government fell and Winston was out of office, his wilderness years. Politically

he may have been wandering in barren places, a lonely fighter trying to awaken

Britain to the menace of Hitler, but artistically that wilderness bore abundant

fruit. During these years he often painted in the South of France. Of the

500-odd canvases extant, roughly 250 date from 1930 to 1939.

Painting remained a joy to Churchill to the end of his life. “Happy are the

painters,” he had written in his book Painting as a Pastime, “ for they shall

not be lonely. Light and color, peace and hope, will keep them company to the

end of the day.” And so it was for my father.