'Like a sea-beast fished up from the depths' is how, in his 1921 essay 'Painting as a Pastime', Winston Churchill describes feeling when, having given up his position as First Lord of the Admiralty after the disastrous Gallipoli campaign, he found himself with 'long hours of utterly unwonted leisure in which to contemplate the frightful unfolding of war'. Painting saved him, as he goes on to detail in characteristically rousing style. Rapt appreciation of the back garden was evidently enough to keep 'black dog' at bay but Churchill reserved special affection for Marrakech, which he first visited in December 1935, painting several views of the Ochre City.
It was here, in 1943, that Churchill was introduced to the work of Hassan El Glaoui and, seeing promise, encouraged the young painter's father to allow him to continue with his studies. Churchill's powers of persuasion in the matter shouldn't be underestimated – the father in question was the Pasha of Marrakech and painter was hardly an appropriate occupation for a Berber tribesman.
This show unites some of Churchill's Morocco paintings from the 1930s to the 1950s with a cross section of work from the career of El Glaoui, now a grand old man of North African art. What you get is a great story that also makes for a succinct illustration of the differences between pastime and profession. For all his rhetoric – comparing the roles of painter and commander-in-chief, for example – Churchill seems content to record rather than impose his will on his subject, his buttery William Nicholson-esque brushstroke sometimes turning clotted and fussy in the process. As focused on his surroundings, El Glaoui, on the other hand, borrows from Cézanne, Dufy and, in particular, Matisse to inject a sense of stripped-back sophistication into deftly conjured street scenes from the 1960s – highlights of an intercontinental, cross-generational conversation, cleverly displayed in Lord Leighton's architectural ode to East-meets-West.