2021 is the year of Sir Winston Churchill. It was in March 2021 that a new auction record was set for a work by the former UK Prime Minister and amateur painter with the £8.3-million-auction of the 1943 painting Tower of the Koutoubia Mosque. On 23 June, another interesting painting by Churchill will go under the hammer at Phillips in New York.
Exactly 100 years ago, Winston Churchill painted a painting with a tree-lined ditch as a motif while staying at the house of his wife Clementine's cousin, Venetia Montagu. Churchill kept The Moat, Breccles with him for forty years before giving it to his good friend, the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, as a present in 1961.
Onassis had the painting hung in a prominent place in his yacht Christina (named after his only daughter), the first super yacht ever – and a great love of his life. Onassis, who made his money with an oil tanker fleet, bought the Canadian frigate Stormont, which was used when the Allies landed in Normandy in 1948, in order to have it converted into floating luxury accommodation at a shipyard in Kiel, replete with an outdoor pool with antique mosaics, a parking space for a seaplane, and other extravagant facilities, including an operating theatre.
The rich, beautiful and powerful cavorted on and below deck of the 99-meter-long Christina, including Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier of Monaco, John D. Rockefeller, Greta Garbo, Maria Callas (with whom Onassis had an affair from 1959) and Jackie Kennedy (with whom he was married from 1968).
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Churchill and Onassis met in January 1956 at the house of mutual acquaintances in France. Straight away, they got along well and the first invitation on board Christina immediately followed. By 1963, the British statesman had been on the boat eight times, which became synonymous with a luxury yacht.
Jean-Paul Engelen, Phillips Deputy Chairman and Worldwide Co-Head of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, said, “Two of the most influential figures of the 20th century, Churchill and Onassis formed a remarkable friendship, which Churchill sought to honour by gifting a work that he treasured in his own private collection for forty years. Long thought to have been lost, The Moat, Breccles was in fact aboard the Christina and is now being sold by the Onassis Family a century after its creation and fifty years after it was generously gifted by the statesman to the family.”
The Moat, Breccles will be called up at Phillips with an estimated price of $1.5-2 million (£1-1.4 mil).
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