The Onassis family has auctioned off a painting by Winston Churchill Art and Culture News

After decades in storage, Winston Churchill’s painting Phillips will be auctioned off in New York at an estimated $ 1.5 million to $ 2 million.

The landscape, The Moat, Breccles, was painted by Churchill in 1921 and has been in his collection for 40 years. “He didn’t like giving or selling paintings,” says Jean-Paul Engel’s vice president and Phillips ’XX.

But after forming a friendship with the shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis in the late 1950s, Churchill decided to give Onassis an honor to a select group that had previously included Queen Elizabeth and Dwight D. Eisenhower: a gift from one of Churchill’s works of art.

Specifically, Onassis gave The Moat to Breccles. “If your friend Onassis is one of the richest and strongest entrepreneurs in the world, then of course you will give him something that is dear to you and that you are proud of,” says Engelen.

Onassis was properly touched. He exhibited the painting in the Christina salon of his super sailboat, where Engelen says he hung it, along with paintings by El Greco, Pissarro, Gaugin and Vermeer.

The work depicts a bucolic summer landscape owned by Churchill’s wife’s cousin at Breccles Hall, a historic mansion in Norfolk. The painting was last seen in public when a camera crossed Onassis’ living room in 1964 in a documentary, The Other World of Winston Churchill.

History

Churchill and Onassis have been friends since Churchill’s son introduced them to Randolph in 1956.

The former prime minister made less than eight cruises aboard the Onassis ship from 1958 to 1963, according to Phillips. The yacht was temporarily one of the most famous in the world. Onassis bought a Canadian frigate at the end of World War II for $ 34,000, then spent $ 4 million renovating it.

In a letter to his wife, Churchill said Christina is “the most beautiful structure I’ve ever seen in the water.”

Onassis then used the sailboat with celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, billionaires like J. Paul Getty, artists like Rudolf Nureyev, and rulers like John F. and Jackie Kennedy — they married Onassis in 1968.

Among its many features, Christina included a bar (“Ari’s bar”) that included the whale’s teeth and chairs covered in whale prep.

When Onassis died in 1975, his daughter handed over the vessel to the Greek government, although its contents remained in the family and the Churchill painting was kept in storage. “They realized they had a painting,” says Engelen, “and after the interviews it was decided that maybe instead of keeping it in storage, it was something he should turn to the next collector.”

The market

Lana Phillips’s XX. Century and Contemporary Art will go on sale on June 23 at its new headquarters on Park Avenue in New York City.

The sale came when a public record of Churchill’s work was set in March at Christie’s in London, when actress Angelina Jolie sold Churchill’s Koutoubia Mosque Tower in 1943 for less than $ 11.6 million. Engelen said he has learned that two of Churchill’s additional paintings have been sold privately for $ 5 million.

Phillips is understandable in reproducing the history of the painting: a promotional video has been made and is intended to be repeated at the auction house’s “Ari’s bar” auction before the sale. Customers will be invited to the bar to grab a glass of Pol Roger, Churchill’s favorite Champagne, although Engelen has stated that the whale’s teeth will be fake and the whale’s foreskin “won’t re-emerge”.

Churchill’s painting will be hung in a re-created bar, “and will tell the story of these two titans of the twentieth century.” It is a rare example, says Engelen, “when the history of art and the history of the world come together.”