Force & Candor

During the splendorous presentation ceremony in big, drafty Westminster Hall last week, Parliament got its first look at the portrait it had commissioned as an 80th birthday gift for Sir Winston Churchill. The reaction was immediate, vehement, and split right down the middle of the aisle. "It's disgusting, ill-mannered," said Lord Hailsham. "A beautiful work, wonderful!" countered Nye Bevan. Privately the Prime Minister--whose distaste for modern art is well known--reportedly muttered: "It makes me look half-witted which I ain't." At the birthday ceremony he commented wryly: "The portrait is a remarkable example of modern art." And when he added, "It certainly combines force and candor," he brought down both Houses.

The portrait, done by Graham Sutherland, one of Britain's top painters, was indeed candid. Ordinary Britons, seeing in black-and-white press photographs a gross, jut-jawed Churchill, shorn of his feet and plainly showing the tracery of age, bombarded their newspapers with outraged protests. But the critics, after a leisurely look, generally approved of its color harmonies: the pinkish paleness of face and hands, the rich black of the clothes, and the strangely appropriate tarnished golden background. Decreed the Times: "A powerful, penetrating image."

When Painter Sutherland went to Chartwell last August for the first sitting, the Prime Minister asked: "Are you going to paint me as a tiger or cherub?" Watching the old man take his seat on a large dais, Sutherland made up his mind. "He took up a position as a tiger. The lip was out. The head was challenging. The eyes were looking direct." Then and there, he made his choice between Churchill the benign and humorous and Churchill the uncompromising. "It seemed to me essential," Sutherland explained, "that Churchill should be portrayed with a certain degree of intransigence--with the moral fiber to have withstood the enemy."

During nine sittings, ranging from two minutes to an exact hour each, Sutherland made scores of sketches--with and without the cigar, separate eye details, hand studies, expressions and color notes ("eyelids appear almost corn color; cheekbones, pink"). Churchill had a few ideas of his own about the portrait, strongly hinted that he should be painted as a Knight of the Garter. Sutherland sketched him in Garter robes, but quietly set the sketches aside in favor of black coat and striped trousers--more fitting, he believed, for a parliamentary gift.

Sutherland tried to remain aloof from last week's uproar, but he could not resist one last rueful word: "I took up portrait painting by accident. Although this commission was interesting, I enormously regret I was asked to paint a national hero. People have their own conception of what a hero is like and too many things other than artistic are involved. I don't think, if I were asked again, that I would do it."

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