Churchill's Moroccan Landscape Fetches $420,000 at Bonhams

NEW YORK—A Winston Churchill landscape, Sunset over Atlas Mountains, Marrakech, sold for $420,00 (with commission) to an anonymous phone bidder at Bonhams yesterday, reports Bloomberg.

The British leader, who started painting around 1915 to help him relax, created the Impressionistic view of the Moroccan landscape during a 1935 vacation. In 1943 he took U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt to admire the depicted view after the Casablanca Conference.

Churchill never sold his works during his career, but they have done well at auction in recent years. Last July his bucolic Chartwell Landscape with Sheep, sold for a record $2.03 million at Sotheby's in London, more than five times the high estimate.

Sunset, which Churchill left to a daughter and which has sold several times since, failed to reach its high estimate of $600,000 because, according to James R. Borynack of Wally Findlay Galleries International, "as glorious as the colors were and the historic legend of it, it doesn't have that glow."