An imposing portrait of the Duke of Marlborough, presented to Winston Churchill in 1942 with slight reservations on the part of both donor and recipient, will go on display for the first time when Chartwell, Churchill’s beloved family home, reopens for the season tomorrow.
Extensive conservation work has made the painting stable enough to display, while new research has revealed how it came into the collection—and that it is not a Victorian copy but over 300 years old, probably made in the lifetime of the duke.
Katherine Carter, the National Trust’s curator at Chartwell, says that since Marlborough, the hero of the Battle of Blenheim against the French in 1704, was both an ancestor of Churchill’s and his great hero, it was always assumed that it had been in the family collection for generations. When she took the job in 2013 and first saw it in the stores, it was in shocking condition, very dirty, with extensive over painting, and multiple areas of flaking paint making it too fragile to move.
“I suspect it was never hung here, it was in such poor condition and so large that it was difficult to find a space for it—always a problem at Chartwell to this day, with so many pictures and not much wall space.”
The National Trust had owned Chartwell for 18 years before Churchill’s death in 1965, after it was bought and presented by a group of supporters on condition the family would continue living there. The first public displays were partly arranged by his widow Clementine, but the portrait stayed in the stores and there was nothing about it in the house records.
A recent substantial donation from the Canadian collectors and philanthropists Jeff Mooney and his wife Suzanne Bolton, who saw its sad state on a private visit to the stores, funded the work.
Carter discovered correspondence in the massive Churchill Archive, held at Churchill College in Cambridge, showing that it came to him in 1942 from a Scottish peer, Lord Saltoun, at one of the lowest points of the war when Churchill had just learned of the fall of Singapore, which he described as “the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British History”.
Saltoun wrote to John Martin, Churchill’s principal private secretary, that he had never been an admirer but was so impressed by Churchill’s wartime leadership and speeches that he wished to present the portrait, as “in common with I expect many others I feel a deep personal debt to the PM.”
He had just acquired the painting, “which I believe to be a good one”, he wrotne, and if it was accepted, “I shall feel happy to have done something to lighten a personal debt and it may bring him luck in what lies before him.” Kathleen Hill, Churchill’s personal secretary, responded to Martin, “The PM is inclined to accept provided we do not write too gushing an acceptance!”
Churchill responded by sending Saltoun his gigantic million-word, four-volume biography of Marlborough. Saltoun wrote that his wife was particularly interested in the history of the period, “and now looks forward to a prolonged gratification”.
The painting appears to be a version of a portrait by the Dutch artist Adriaen van der Werff, which now hangs in the Uffizi Galleries in Florence. Carter says that Churchill actually owned a print of it, “so precious to him that it hung at the foot of his bed so that it was the last thing he saw at night and the first thing he saw in the morning.”
Saltoun believed that his picture, probably commissioned by one of his own ancestors, was a contemporary copy by either Van der Werff himself or his brother Pieter, but correspondence between the National Trust and experts on the artist at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam suggests it is more likely to be a copy by an English artist.
The analysis of the pigments has however pushed its date back to the late 17th or early 18th century. The cleaning and stabilisation of the flaking paint, and removal of later overpaint—possibly done because the picture was never entirely completed—have revealed many details for the first time in centuries, including a little group of cavalry officers in the background.
Research continues, but having managed to clear a prominent space for the painting on the main staircase at Chartwell, Carter says it is wonderful to be able to display it at last in the year marking the 375th anniversary of Marlborough’s birth.
Churchill wrote to Saltoun: “I shall always value the picture not only in itself, but also for the feelings so gracefully expressed in your letter to my Private Secretary, which prompted the gift.”
