The painting "The Bridge of Aix en Provence" by Winston Churchill is up for auction

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October 10, 2021 "Painting is like an attack on the canvas that must be carried out with the tactics of a general on the battlefield".

Thus spoke Sir Winston Churchill of his great passion: painting discovered in adulthood, at the age of forty, in 1914, when he and his wife and three children moved to Surrey, in the Hoe farm, a charming country house.

There are many traces of this passion of his, such as the painting "The bridge of Aix en Provence" that the statesman gave in 1948 to the Swiss paint manufacturer Willy Sax as a tribute to their long friendship.

The oil painting will be at the center of Christie's British Modern Art auction on Wednesday 20 October in London. The work is estimated at 1,500,000-2,500,000 pounds. The current record for a Churchill painting was reached last March by Christie's: "The tower of the Koutoubia mosque", executed in January 1943, purchased by an anonymous Belgian collector for 8,285,000 pounds. The painting was put up for sale by Hollywood star Angelina Jolie.       

The scene depicted in the painting "The bridge of Aix en Provence" certainly attracted Churchill for his love for water painting, but also because this particular panorama was painted by Paul Cézanne, "Trois Sautets" ("Three small jumps" ). In the last year of his life, Cézanne made two watercolors of the scene, "Baigneuses sous un pont" (now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York) and "Le Pont des Trois Sautets" (Cincinnati Art Museum).

In 1948 Willy Sax and the Swiss artist Charles Montag visited Churchill in the south of France, where he painted "The Bridge of Aix en Provence", one of two paintings of this subject he made. Sax's contribution to Churchill's artistic passion went beyond providing materials. Their shared passion led to the conception of a handful of products created specifically for Churchill. "Royal Blue", formerly called "Churchill Blue", was a color made especially for the statesman in light and deep shades. Churchill, who preferred to work on larger canvases than those intended for amateurs of painting en plen air, painted quickly, using colors directly from the tube if possible.The statesman was looking for a color that could come close to the hue of the sky, and so Sax created the color specifically for his purposes. They also made many trips together, and Sax introduced Churchill to much of his artistic knowledge, including the Swiss painter Cuno Amiet.