Churchill work fetches more than £400,000

An oil painting by former Prime Minister Winston Churchill raised more than £400,000 at auction.

The Giza Pyramids at Cairo, painted in 1946, had been given by Churchill to his friend General Jan Christian Smuts, a South African statesman who served as a British field marshal in the World War II.

It passed through his family before being sold to an anonymous buyer in 1999, who then auctioned it at Christie’s, London, where it raised £421,250.

The painting, marked with the initials WSC, was one of two paintings of the pyramids at Giza given to General Smuts, and hung in the study at his home. The other painting was stolen in 1972 and has never been recovered.

Sir Winston’s daughter Mary Soames wrote in a book on her father’s artwork that in 1946: “Field Marshal Smuts came and stayed for several days.”

“Winston and he spent hours closeted together; my father always set store by this great man’s wisdom. Their relationship dated from 1906, when Smuts had been sent over by the Boers to represent their case to the new Liberal Government, in which Churchill was a junior minister at the Colonial Office.”