IMPRESSIONS OF PARLIAMENT - an original printed appearance of this cartoon featuring then-Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill in the 2 February 1955 edition of the magazine Punch, or The London Charivari
London: Punch, 1955. This original printed appearance of a Punch cartoon featuring Winston S. Churchill comes from the personal collection of Gary L. Stiles, author of Churchill in Punch (Unicorn Publishing Group, 2022). His book is the first ever effort to definitively catalog, describe, and contextualize all of the many Punch cartoons featuring Churchill.
This cartoon appeared thus on p.182 of the 2 February 1955 issue of Punch. The artist is Michael Cummings (1919-1997), who worked for Punch for more than 30 years. The cartoon shows Churchill, the painter, painting over a portrait he loathed.
Churchill’s 80th birthday on 30 November 1954 was a day of national celebration. The marquee event of the day was a televised ceremony in Westminster Hall where Churchill was presented with a portrait by Graham Sutherland, gifted to him jointly by the two Houses of Parliament. Just 10 days before Churchill’s birthday and the portrait’s official presentation, Clementine went to see the painting. She thanked Sutherland and asked for a photograph to bring back to Churchill, whose response reached the painter the following day. Churchill expressed his opinion that the portrait would “bring an element of controversy into a function that was intended to be a matter of general agreement between the Members” and was therefore “not suitable as a presentation from both Houses of Parliament.” Dismayed, Sutherland contacted Charles Doughty, the secretary of the commissioning committee, who, acting as intermediary, was able to convince Churchill that the ceremony should continue as planned for the sake of national morale. Though he was willing to publicly acquiesce, privately he made his opinion well known. He asked his solicitor, “Is it or is it not a libel? I won’t go down in history looking like that.” To his secretary he remarked “I look like a down-and-out drunk who has been picked out of the gutter in the Strand.” At the ceremony Churchill duly thanked the Houses for their generous gift which he called “a remarkable example of modern art”, a designation he undoubtedly intended to be pejorative and which was understood with great laughter from the audience. After the ceremony, the portrait was stored unceremoniously in a Chartwell cellar until, with Lady Churchill’s approval, Churchill's longtime private secretary Grace Hamblin removed and burned it.
Punch or The London Charivari began featuring Churchill cartoons in 1900, when his political career was just beginning. That political career would last two thirds of a century, see him occupy Cabinet office during each of the first six decades of the twentieth century, carry him twice to the premiership and, further still, into the annals of history as a preeminent statesman. And throughout that time, Punch satirized Churchill in cartoons – more than 600 of them, the work of more than 50 different artists.
It was a near-perfect relationship between satirists and subject. That Churchill was distinctive in both persona and physical appearance helped make him easy to caricature. To his persona and appearance he added myriad additional satirical temptations, not just props, like his cigars, siren suits, V-sign, and hats, but also a variety of ancillary avocations and vocations, like polo, painting, brick-laying, and writing. All these were skewered as well.
Some Punch cartoons were laudatory, some critical, and many humorous, like the man himself. Nearly always, Churchill was distinctly recognizable, a larger-than-life character whose presence caricature served only to magnify. Item #007198
Price: $45.00