Winston Churchill

Sir Winston Churchill was the British wartime Prime Minister and a keen amateur painter, born at Blenheim Palace near Woodstock. He took up painting in 1915 after the failure of the Gallipoli campaign, and over the next fifty years made more than five hundred pictures, mostly landscapes in bright oils painted on holidays in the south of France, Morocco and at his home at Chartwell in Kent. He wrote the essay Painting as a Pastime, exhibited in Paris under the name Charles Morin, and was made Honorary Academician Extraordinary of the Royal Academy in 1948. His studio at Chartwell, now kept by the National Trust, still holds many of his canvases.