Churchill paintings now on exhibit in St. Louis

It is no secret that spending time among nature's landscapes can alleviate many emotional and mental ills, and no one knew that better than Winston Churchill. When 1915 brought an "enforced resignation" to the political leader, he turned to a new hobby-painting-and a thus new way of looking at the world.

Now the rest of us can experience those healing vistas through an exhibit of Churchill's paintings at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis, which is collaborating with the National Churchill Museum in Fulton as part of a worldwide commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Churchill's death.

"Churchill suffered from depression," Tim Riley, Paintings Curator for the National Churchill Museum, said. "He gained a solace from painting."

The painter came to his art later in life, not picking up a brush until he was 40, but it was an activity he pursued and in which he became quite accomplished. Churchill created 575 paintings in his lifetime, 350 of those were land and seascapes.

"One is quite astonished to find how many things there are in a landscape," wrote the world leader in his essay, "Painting as a Pastime," which was published in a collection entitled "Amid these Storms" in 1932. "So many colors in the hillside, each different in shadow and in sunlight....And I had lived for over 40 years without even noticing any of them except in a general way."

According to Riley, Churchill anonymously submitted a painting to an amateur art exhibition at Sunderland House in London in 1925. The judges of the competition were influential art dealer Sir Joseph Duveen, art historian Kenneth Clark, and painter Oswald Birley. The painting was awarded first prize, though Duveen dissented, feeling the painting was of such quality it must have been done by a professional.

Churchill later entered the same painting under a pseudonym into the prestigious summer exhibition at London's Royal Academy of the Arts. Only after the work was accepted was Churchill's true identity revealed. The next year, in 1948, Churchill was elected a Royal Academician Extraordinary by the Royal Academy of Arts.

Many in the U.S. aren't aware that Churchill was not only a political and military leader but an artist and writer as well. In 1953 he won the Nobel Prize in literature for his many literary works, but most especially for his six volume series on the second world war.

"There was brilliance in him," Riley said of Churchill. "He was prescient in so many ways. He predicted the Cold War. He was an eloquent speaker. And when he wrote, it was as though he was painting with words."

This will not be the first showing of Churchill's paintings on this side of the ocean. In 1958 a North American tour included exhibits in Kansas City, Detroit, Minneapolis, Toronto, Washington DC and New York, where the paintings were on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

According to Riley, "The exhibition set attendance records everywhere it went." Many of the best paintings from that tour, plus many others, are on display in the St. Louis exhibit, which opened its doors on Nov. 13 and runs through Feb. 14, 2016.

The museum is located on Washington University's Danforth Campus, near the intersection of Skinker and Forsyth boulevards. Regular hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily except Tuesdays and 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. the first Friday of each month. The museum is open to the public and admission is free.