Painting as a Pastime Winston S. Churchill

Second edition 1949

Dimensions: 22 cm x 15 cm

Hardcover: 

Painting as a Pastime

London: Odhams Press Limited, Ernest Benn Limited, 1948. First edition, first printing. Hardcover. This is the first edition, first printing of Painting as a Pastime, Churchill's essay about his famous hobby. It had been printed in The Strand Magazine as early as 1921, but it was not until 1948 - nearly three decades after his first published words on the subject - that Churchill consented to a book about his pastime and passion.

While the first edition was an attractive enough little book, the coarse, pale green cloth binding proved highly susceptible to soiling and sunning and the thin maroon and white dust jacket incredibly vulnerable to wear. This copy is in good condition in a good plus dust jacket. The binding is square, tight, and clean with only minor shelf wear and bright gilt. Its significant defect is ghosting; differential toning of the front cover reveals a faint image of the print and image from the front face of the dust jacket. Apart from the ghosting, there is sunning at the edges where the dust jacket allowed sunlight to touch the binding extremities. The contents are bright with a crisp feel and no previous ownership marks. Light spotting appears confined to the page edges. The dust jacket is complete, including the original front flap price, and unfaded. There is wear to the hinges, flap folds, and extremities, minor overall soiling, and spotting to the front cover illustration, including some speckling to Churchills shoulders and hat. The dust jacket is protected beneath a removable, clear, archival cover.

Soldier, writer, and politician, Churchill was perhaps an unlikely painter. Nonetheless he proved both a prolific and passionate one. Churchill first took up painting during the First World War. May 1915 saw Churchill scapegoated for failure in the Dardanelles and slaughter at Gallipoli and forced from his Cabinet position at the Admiralty. By November 1915 Churchill was serving at the Front, leading a battalion in the trenches. But during the summer of 1915, as he battled depression, he rented Hoe Farm in Surrey, which he frequented with his wife and three children. One day in June, Churchill noticed his brother's wife, Gwendeline, sketching in watercolors. Churchill borrowed her brush and swiftly found solace in painting, which would be a passion and source of release and renewal for the remaining half century of his long life.

Winston's wife Clementine had opposed the idea of her husband's opining in print on the subject, concerned that he might be belittled by professional painters and others. Clementine aside, it may be that Churchill's comparative reticence on the subject was to keep something personal in the great and turbulent sweep of his otherwise tremendously public life. He wrote, "Painting is a friend who makes no undue demands, excites to no exhausting pursuits, keeps faithful pace even with feeble steps, and holds her canvas as a screen between us and the envious eyes of Time or the surly advance of Decrepitude" (Painting as a Pastime, p. 13).

Whatever Churchill's reason for penning and ultimately consenting to book publication of Painting as a Pastime complete with images of his paintings, the relatively few words he offered on the subject add something truly personal and different to the great body of his writing.