Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill (1927) at the National Portrait Gallery, London, represents Walter Sickert's late engagement with portraiture and his characteristic method of working from photographs rather than live sittings, a practice that would later generate controversy and become central to his late career. By 1927, Churchill was out of political office following the Conservative Party's defeat in 1929 and was in his so-called 'wilderness years', though in 1927 he was still Chancellor of the Exchequer under Baldwin. Sickert's use of photographic sources for portraits was consistent with his broader theoretical position that the camera was a legitimate tool for the artist rather than a threat to painting's integrity. His portraits made from photographs tend to have a particular quality — a combination of frozen instant and painterly transformation — that distinguishes them from both conventional portrait painting and photographic realism. Churchill himself was an amateur painter of some enthusiasm and had friendly contact with several British artists. Sickert's rendering subjects him to the same tonal scrutiny he brought to lodging-house nudes and music hall performers — there is no flattery, no official grandeur, simply the painter's intelligence brought to bear on a public face. The National Portrait Gallery holds the definitive collection of British portraiture.

Oil on canvas likely developed from photographic source material, a practice Sickert embraced openly by this period. Broad tonal masses define the figure with characteristic economy of means. Sickert's late portraits achieve their psychological weight through simplification rather than accumulation of detail.