The Atlas Mountains from Marrakesh is being offered for private sale, rather than auction, alongside eight other works by Britain’s wartime Prime Minister, with a combined value of £10 million. Christie’s has been inundated with requests to sell Churchill paintings as a result. Jolie sold it at Christie’s in March for a record £8.25 million. It was subsequently acquired from an American gallery by art-loving film star, Brad Pitt, who gave it to his partner at the time, Angelina Jolie. Not only has the cigar connection been established, but the painting is from the same series of views as a similar, but earlier Moroccan landscape, The Tower of the Koutoubia Mosque, the only painting he ever completed during the war which Churchill gave to President Roosevelt on his birthday. Since it was last sold, the painting has taken on added significance. It is now being sold by a Scandinavian collector who acquired it privately in 1995 and will be exhibited for sale at Christie’s in London next week (June 1st – 16th). Giraudier sold the painting at Christie's in 1993 for £32,000 but his name was not cited in the catalogue and the story of how he acquired the painting was never revealed. It soon became part and parcel of his image as a powerful statesman and at Chartwell he kept between 3,000 and 4,000 cigars in a room adjacent to his study, sometimes smoking ten of them a day. The wartime leader had begun smoking cigars on a trip to Cuba after he graduated from Sandhurst Royal Military College in 1895. “It was not an exchange”, adds Angus Grunland of Christie’s, but “a token of friendship”. They had to want them for their artistic merit, not because of who painted them.” “Churchill often gave paintings away”, says the Churchill art expert, David Coombs. In preparing the painting for sale more recently, Christie’s looked into the provenance and discovered the link between Churchill, Giraudier and the painting. The two maintained a correspondence which is in the Churchill Archive in Cambridge. Giraudier shipped over 500 at a time, three times a year, at no cost to Churchill that is how he came by the painting. The two found they had many things in common including the love of art, poetry, good wine and cigars.Īs a result of the chance meeting in Cuba, Giraudier supplied him with cigars, free of charge, thereafter - hand rolled 7-inch Por Larranaga cigars at first, and then Don Joaquin, which Churchill’s private Secretary, Anthony Montague Browne, said were his favourite and formed ‘the core of his collection”. In fact, it belonged to Antonio Giraudier, an Oxford educated Cuban beer baron, who in 1946 encountered Churchill going about his daily swim on a crowded beach at the Havana Yacht Club and offered him the seclusion of his own private beach. The Atlas Mountains from Marrakesh last appeared for public sale in 1993 but no details about the seller were revealed. Sir Winston Churchill gave his Cuban cigar dealer a painting as a “token of friendship” after they met by chance on Havana beach, The Telegraph can reveal as it goes on display for the first time in nearly 30 years.
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