Signed photographic portrait
[London: Vivienne, 20th Century Studios Ltd., 1950].
1 original print, mounted on strong cardboard, framed.
The first portrait of Churchill by Florence Vivienne.
A rare print offered by Winston Churchill: it bears, under the photograph, a dedication from Churchill to E.M. Pommier, a French Resistance fighter during the Second World War. The ink on the dedication has faded but is still visible.
A letter from Churchill’s private secretary has been preserved on the reverse, certifying that the photograph and signature were sent and sending the Prime Minister’s compliments to E. Pommier.
The letter is dated 1954, one year before he handed over the premiership to his successor, Anthony Eden.
We apologize for the imperfect translation generated by Deepl for the purposes of the show.
Florence Vivienne Entwistle got her start in photography by helping her husband, Ernest Entwistle, and her son, Antony, to take photographs in 1934. She set up her own studio in the late 1930s and specialised in portraits of public figures. The relationship with the Churchills went beyond the professional realm, as in October 1949 the Churchills’ daughter Sarah married Vivienne’s son Antony. The Churchills ‘learned of the marriage … from the newspapers and were very upset … especially Clementine, who took it very badly’. Nevertheless, on 19 December 1949, the Churchill couple met the Vivienne couple and, ‘after a pleasant lunch together, Florence Vivienne painted the portrait of Winston Churchill in her Piccadilly studio’ (Gilbert, Vol. VIII, p. 496). Churchill liked the portrait so much that he used it in the following year’s general election campaign in February 1950 and it became one of the Prime Minister’s most famous portraits. Florence Vivienne was known for demanding that her subjects come into her studio and the dust jacket of her autobiography (They Came to My Studio, published in 1956) is illustrated with this photograph. Vivienne recalls (p. 16) how iconic this image has become, and that it was the only one she took of Winston Churchill at the time.
As the relationship with the Churchills became a family affair, Florence Vivienne “is perhaps the only photographer to have had the privilege of photographing the whole family” in the private setting, taking one of Clementine a few weeks later. The National Portrait Gallery holds 214 of Vivienne’s portraits, including this one, falsely dated 1951, 14 of which are of the Churchill family, most of which were taken at their country home, Chartwell.
