Churchill's paintings are worth millions – if you can get them authenticated

Telegraph

a day ago

In the summer of 1916, Winston Churchill holidayed at Herstmonceux Castle in East Sussex with his wife, Clementine. While he was there, the future prime minister indulged in his newly discovered passion for painting.
He chose to paint a landscape of the castle, which was owned by his fellow politician Claude Lowther, but scrapped the plan and used the same canvas to instead capture a colourful scene of 'Clemmie' sitting in the sunken garden, surrounded by pink rambler roses.
Churchill, an amateur who painted for pleasure, did not sign the painting, but Lowther made an inscription on the back stating who painted it, who was in the picture and when it was made. Stylistically, the painting is typical of Churchill – the female figure is stiff, while he put blotches of blue on tree leaves to show the sky – and Violet Bonham Carter, a friend of the couple, wrote in her diaries that she saw him painting at Herstmonceux during that time.
That was the case put forward by the team on BBC One's Fake or Fortune?, in an episode broadcast earlier this week.
Barry James, a carer and passionate art collector, bought the painting for just £140 at a Sussex antique fair in 2022 and discovered the Lowther inscription on the back. He had struggled to get the painting authenticated as a genuine Churchill, so enlisted the help of Fiona Bruce and Philip Mould.
Despite the compelling evidence gathered by the Fake or Fortune? team that suggested it was indeed done by Churchill, there was no 'smoking gun' piece of documentary evidence to definitively prove it.
Much of the episode became an exercise in 'to me, to you' buck-passing of which The Chuckle Brothers would have been proud. The Churchill Paintings Group – a collection of academics, experts and family members that maintains the definitive Churchill artistic catalogue – declined to authenticate the painting for James. They suggested the big London auction houses might do so instead. When Mould, a renowned art dealer, went to Bonhams to try just that, he was told that it needed to be done by an expert or the estate. Stalemate.
To the frustration of James, and the millions of viewers of Fake or Fortune?, he continues to be stuck in limbo, months after the programme was filmed.
Mould, who is clearly convinced that James has a genuine Churchill on his hands, suggested there were two prices for the painting: he could sell it now, without total authentication, to a speculative collector who hoped definitive proof would eventually arrive, for between £100,000 and £200,000. Or James could wait for such evidence to emerge and possibly make as much as £600,000.
'Computer says no'
Many will not understand why the group, an expert body set up to preserve Churchill's artistic legacy, will not engage with James's painting. The obstinate stance could open it up to accusations of behaving amateurishly, or a dereliction of duty. The insistence on cast-iron documentary proof that Churchill was the painting's creator leads to the feeling that there is a 'computer-says-no' attitude at play.
'I've always seen it as a responsibility amongst formal groups of art historians who publish catalogues raisonnés to ensure that works are comprehensively considered on the full merits of their cases,' Mould tells me. 'This includes provenance, but also documentary evidence, scientific analysis and stylistic comparisons.'
The history of art is a living thing, not preserved in aspic, and sometimes requires experts to take a risk and accept the evidence before them – even if it is not as comprehensive as they might like. 'Art history relies upon this continuous and connoisseurial process in order that the canon of a deceased artist's work is kept up to date,' Mould adds.
'It will be interesting to see what happens in the future with Churchill Paintings Group – there are undoubtedly more genuine works by Churchill that are awaiting to be formally anointed. Barry's picture is one of them, and by the standards of most art historical processes of appraisal, and with due impartiality, would, on all the evidence I've seen, be accepted as such.'
Market explosion
There are particular pressures when it comes to Churchill's oeuvre because the market for his paintings has exploded in recent years. The art world was electrified when Angelina Jolie sold a Churchill painting at Christie's in 2021 for £8.2m. Tower of the Koutoubia Mosque was the only painting he did during the Second World War and he gave it as a gift to Franklin D Roosevelt – making it a piece of particular fascination – but plenty of others have now gone under the hammer for more than £1m.
One factor that may be influencing the Churchill Paintings Group is fear of being sued for an incorrect attribution. There's no precedent for this in the UK, but lawsuits in the US on the matter are common.
'Unfortunately what's happened is that the world has become increasingly litigious, so people are just very cautious,' says Nick Orchard, head of modern British and Irish art at Christie's. 'So you get some groups who will not really authenticate a work because they are concerned that if it turns out to be wrong they get sued.'
The estates of artists such as Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, for instance, have stopped authenticating new works entirely, such was the level of legal difficulty in which they became embroiled.
The Churchill situation is especially 'complex', Orchard adds, because the provenance of his work has a large bearing on what sale price it could fetch. 'Churchill painted really for his own pleasure and didn't sell his work – he either kept it or gave it to friends, or people of significance – so the stories about who he's given a painting to and who that individual is can make a massive difference to the value of the painting,' he says – hence the value of the Jolie picture.
Of the Churchill Paintings Group, Orchard says, 'I don't know that they necessarily apply a rigorous scientific process to expertise. So I just think they don't want risk.'
Some of those who have sold Churchill paintings previously reckon that James's painting is the real deal. Luke Bodalbhai, a fine art specialist at Cheffins in Cambridgeshire, is one such.
Bodalbhai points out that circumstantial evidence is the way Old Masters tend to be authenticated, because 'it's rare that you have a provenance trail going back hundreds of years directly to when it was painted' and that the same should apply to the apparent Churchill.
'I would have been happy to have sold that painting as, at the very least, attributed to Churchill,' he adds. 'Obviously it wasn't signed, but signatures aren't the be-all and end-all.'
The Churchill Paintings Group
Membership of the Churchill Paintings Group includes Allen Packwood, the director of the Churchill Archives Centre at Churchill College, Cambridge, and Barry Phipps, an art historian and fellow of Churchill College, as well as Churchill's own descendants.
Paul Rafferty, an artist and adviser to the group who is an expert on Churchill's work, told Mould on BBC One that 'if I were to stand up and give my opinion I would feel very confident in being positive about this painting'.
Packwood tells me that, despite the widespread frustration many feel on behalf of James, the remit of the paintings group is misunderstood.
'The Churchill Paintings Group is an informal working group to consider issues relating to paintings by the late Sir Winston Churchill (1874–1965), to maintain the accuracy of the catalogue and to coordinate activity where possible,' he says in a statement. '... The group does not authenticate Churchill paintings.'
According to the official Churchill catalogue, compiled by the now-retired art historian David Coombs, the statesman produced more than 500 paintings. There are no current plans to expand it further and, in the absence of Coombs, there appears to be no mechanism by which a Churchill painting might be authenticated in future.
Thus we are in a bizarre situation. The Churchill Paintings Group claims not to be the appropriate expert body to authenticate pictures he may have painted – though it is hard to think of any collection of people more clued-up on his work – while experts elsewhere defer to the authority of the Churchill Paintings Group. It all feels a bit wimpy for a market running into the many millions, where the sale of a single painting could transform an owner's life.
James told Mould he would 'reluctantly' sell the painting if it was confirmed as a Churchill, and he would use some of the money to take his disabled son on holiday to Niagara Falls. But he should not totally despair.
In 2015, another apparent Churchill painting surfaced on Fake or Fortune? but there was not enough proof at the time for it to pass muster. The work, of a sun-drenched village square on the French Riviera, was only authenticated as a Churchill five years later.
Rafferty had discovered a photograph of the scene at Chartwell, the Churchill family home in Kent, which was enough evidence to force Coombs to accept it as genuine.
James will have to hope something similar turns up to help him.