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It was the last day of the Casablanca Conference between Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt, January 24, 1943. The war now took a decisive turn - from then on the Allies saw "unconditional surrender" as a

sine qua

non

for victory over Nazi Germany.

The American had wanted to get ready to leave, but Churchill was able to persuade him to travel with him to Marrakech, 150 miles from Casablanca.

"You just can't have made it all the way to Morocco without seeing Marrakech," Churchill later recounted in his memoir.

“I have to sit next to you when you watch the sunset over the snow-capped peaks of the Atlas Mountains.” Churchill was enchanted by Marrakech on his first visit in the winter of 1935/36.

Roosevelt agreed.

In Marrakech they took quarters in the house of the American Vice Consul, from which one had a magnificent view of the city and the Atlas Mountains.

Early the next morning Churchill accompanies the President on the drive to the nearby airfield, but he returns to the villa to immerse himself in the picture, now in rising light, in wordless amazement - and "The tower of the Koutouba- Mosque ”.

Now this historic testimony has been auctioned at Christie's in London: for £ 8.2 million.

Churchill's souvenir picture of Marrakech - auctioned by Angelina Jolie

Source: Christie's Images

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Churchill later gave the picture to Roosevelt as a memento of this brief interlude in the maelstrom of war and as a seal for the "special relationship" as which he described the close British-American relationship.

It is the only picture he wrested from wartime.

This raises it among all of his works to the status of top-prize-worthy rarity.

It comes from the workshop of a hobby painter and Nobel Prize winner in literature who made history less with the canvas or literature than with his outstanding political presence.

A picture from his easel - Churchill left over 500 paintings - is like a special trouvaille, less an object of the highest art than an encounter with the mysterious phenomenon of historical greatness, which plays with the brush in order to camouflage itself decoratively.

Fortunately, Churchill discovered painting for himself during the First World War, in 1915, when he lost the naval office due to the Gallipoli disaster and fell into a deep depression - the "black dog", as he called it.

It became a therapy to calm the restlessness at the bottom of his soul.

"If it weren't for painting, I couldn't live," he later confessed to John Rothenstein, the director of the Tate Gallery.

"I couldn't stand the tension of things."

In an enthusiastic essay from 1921, "Painting As a Pastime", Churchill put his Malcredo on paper early on.

“Leisure activity” was pure understatement, because what he said about the eye and the appropriation of painterly objects was highly praised by many connoisseurs, including the important German art historian Ernst Gombrich, who fled to England.

Churchill in Madeira

Source: Bridgeman Images

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The key words of the 1921 essay are enthusiasm, audacity (“audacity”), joie de vivre, intensity of experience.

Actually, for Churchill, dealing with the laws of the show and their processing was the continuation of the vita activa by other means.

"Change is the key," it said at a significant point in the essay, "the exhausted parts of the mind can rest and regenerate, not simply through rest, but through the activation of other parts."

The signature on Churchill's "Tower of the Katoubia Mosque"

Source: REUTERS

The classic beauties of nature dominate in his paintings: calm or wind animated water, flawless snow, dark trees with dense foliage as if on watch or flooded by sunlight, distant mountains, the edge of the sea in the midi, and above all the blazing ocher light sparkling Sun, his favorite color.

The canvas from Marrakech combines this his preference.

One might deny her artistic brilliance, such as the “Gulf Fish Pond in Chartwell”, which went under the hammer at Sotheby's seven years ago, for a modest 1.8 million pounds.

But it doesn't do him justice.

The lucky buyer from back then could sell it today for a multiple of this surcharge.

In any case, the Marrakech picture came from the possession of the film actress Angelina Jolie, whose ex-husband Brad Pitt claims to have acquired it at an auction in New Orleans in 2011 for around 2.5 million euros - and gave it to her as a gift.

With Churchill, the world always learns - this time, how with him strength is paired with grace, political determination and artistic aplomb.

Renowned painters were his friends and stood by his own development - John Lavery, Walter Sickert, Paul Maze, William Nicholson.

Lavery paid Churchill a great compliment in his autobiography, "The Life of a Painter": "If he had chosen painting instead of statecraft from an early age, I think he would have become a great master of the brush."

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