For a serious artist wanting to portray Churchill on canvas or in clay, there were always two major obstacles to overcome. The first was simply to get him to show up for a sitting. The second was to keep him in the same pose for more than a few seconds. “Of all the portraits I have ever done,” complained the artist Clare Sheridan, who was also Churchill's cousin, “Winston's was the hardest, not because his face was difficult, but because it was for him a physical impossibility to remain still” (50). This helps to explain why the most powerful image of him was captured by the photographer Yousuf Karsh, who was allowed only a few minutes to take a formal portrait, and who made the most of the right moment when he dared to take Churchill's cigar away from him. “He looked so belligerent,” Karsh recalled, “he could have devoured me” (106).
As Jonathan Black points out in this valuable new study, Karsh's photograph—which was taken in 1941—is one of the most widely reproduced images in the history of photography. In one fleeting second, he captured forever the look that Churchill used to such advantage in a political career that lasted more than half a century—the look that said, “I bend but never break.” It was not so much a pose as an attitude, and Karsh knew how to bring it out. Under its influence, Churchill had long ago discovered the trick of transforming his figure of modest height and thick frame into an impressive pillar of strength and resolve.
Black has done a great service for Churchill scholarship by methodically gathering and analyzing the major efforts to draw, paint, sculpt, and photograph the most influential British statesman of the twentieth century. There are, of course, many familiar works in this book, including not only the Karsh photo but also the Ivor Roberts-Jones bronze in Parliament Square. Happily, there are also many surprises. I had not realized that the great John Singer Sargent sketched Churchill in charcoal in 1925. We tend to think of Sargent working in the Victorian and Edwardian periods, so it is startling to see an elegant portrait in his distinctive hand from his last days (Sargent died only weeks after completing the work), with Churchill looking more sensitive and refined than usual.
There is nothing of the bulldog in Sargent's sketch, and it is worth noting that the image of Churchill as a squat canine fiercely defending his turf—now so well established—caught on with political cartoonists much faster, and much later, than some may realize. He always looked the part, but it was not until he became prime minister in 1940 that the idea caught on that Churchill's face and attitude bore some resemblance to a British bulldog. A nice, early touch was a tight collar around the four-legged Winston with a tag dangling under his jowls identifying his home as “No. 10.”
Rightly, I think, Black emphasizes the importance of William Orpen's 1916 painting of Churchill in a characteristic pose leaning slightly to one side, with a hand firmly planted at his waist. At the time, Churchill was gravely worried about his political future, not to mention the grim outlook for the world after two years of war. His steady climb to the top ranks of British political power had abruptly ended with the failure of his plans for the Dardanelles in 1915, and when he sat for Orpen he seemed to fear that his career might never recover from his military misjudgments. The painter was able to capture both the look of determination that we later see in Karsh's photo and the sensitivity of Sargent's drawing, with an additional touch of sadness lingering in the face. From the moment he saw the completed painting, Churchill was touched by its powerful evocation of this moment of crisis in his life, and—as Black writes—it “adorned his London dining room until the end of his days” (42). No doubt it was a constant reminder to him of how quickly a politician's career could rise and fall.
The painting of himself he liked least was Graham Sutherland's 1954 portrait in oil, which Churchill's own wife so loathed that she unwisely destroyed it in later years. The surviving photograph of the work leaves no doubt of its artistic merit, but what the subject hated was the way his own grand image of himself was reduced to something dull and mundane—or, as he put it, a painting of an old man “as if sitting on a lavatory” (168). In an age when so many British politicians were conventional in every way—unimaginative and plodding in the manner of, say, Stanley Baldwin—Sutherland chose to make Churchill look ordinary, an unforgivable sin from the sitter's viewpoint at the end of his long, spectacular career.
All in all, Black's study reminds us of how crucial the right image is for a leader, particularly when it is backed by qualities of character that reinforce the surface appearance. In his prime, Churchill proved that he had substance as well as flair, but as one of his parliamentary colleagues observed, he was always a man who “looks and behaves like someone important. He is ‘news’ and looks news” (3).
