Page 384 - The Secret Museum

Churchill’s face, with a thick line around the profile. There is a sense of melancholy,

a trace of the ‘black dog’ Churchill said followed him around, right there, in the lines
of the chalk. It is an intimate sketch, drawn as Churchill sat, thinking, perhaps talking,
in his iconic gruff voice, a few steps from Sutherland’s easel. It felt very personal, to
look so closely at a sketch of his face, created when he was right there. I liked his
wispy, slightly mad-looking eyebrow. The sketch is framed but there is no mount, so
you can see the edge of the paper, which is frayed, where it has been ripped out of a

sketchbook.
The fourth sketch is the largest, and latest, and by this time Sutherland has worked

out exactly what he wants to paint. Churchill is enthroned in a chair, legs slightly
astride, feet firmly planted on the ground, in a pose akin to the one he was captured in
for the final portrait. His character pours forth from the page, the classic Bulldog.
This is the Churchill who won the Second World War with his words. This is the
look of the man who addressed the nation, on Sunday evenings, when crisis
demanded. This is the face of a man whose speeches still echo in the minds of those

who were there, and millions who were born once victory for the Allies had been
won. Even now his words give you goosebumps. 4 June 1940:

We shall go on till the end. We shall fight in France. We shall fight on the
seas and islands. We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be …

Or days later, as the Battle of Britain is about to begin:

Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we
can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may
move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.
But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including

all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark
Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of
perverted science.
Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if
the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will
still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’

It seems to me that Churchill, after all he did for humanity, really ought to have

received a portrait he liked for his 80th birthday. Maybe a gift wasn’t the right
vehicle for Sutherland to present his idea of the ‘real’ Churchill. That’s why I like
these sketches. I feel like the sparkle of possibility for a great portrait is in them.

How lucky the sketches survive as a memory of a controversial moment in
twentieth-century portraiture. Maybe if Churchill’s wife had come across them, she
would have burnt them too, but I don’t think she would. I think she and her husband
would probably have liked them.