Winston Churchill’s Moroccan Landscape Painting Heads to Auction at Christie’s

The painting "Scene at Marrakech", whose auction is already arousing the curiosity of the greatest art collectors, was created in 1935, after a trip to Morocco made by Winston Churchill, on the advice of his friend and mentor, Sir John Lavery. It is therefore his trip to Moroccan soil that he immortalized on this canvas, which expresses his love of nature like most of his works.

The value of the canvas is estimated between 300,000 and 500,000 pounds (approximately 330,000 and 550,000 euros) during the "The Modern British Art Evening" sale. The statesman left behind many canvases, including "The Goldfish Pool at Chartwell" sold for 1.8 million pounds at Sotheby’s in 2014.

It was following the failure of the Dardanelles campaign that Winston Churchill developed a taste for painting. He also confided in this passion cultivated in his forties, in the essay "Painting as a Pastime", published in The Strand magazine. "Happy are the painters, for they shall not be lonely. Light and color, peace and hope, will be their company to the end, or almost to the end of the day," he had written.