(CNN): “That is not a painting, it’s a humiliation!” Winston Churchill (played by John Lithgow) angrily tells the renowned painter Graham Sutherland (actor Stephen Dillane) in the first season of “The Crown,” Netflix’s six-series dramatization about the English monarchy. Churchill is talking about his own portrait, commissioned to celebrate his 80th birthday, as it is unveiled in London’s Westminster Hall in November 1954. Churchill goes on to describe his appearance in the painting as “a broken, sagging, pitiful creature,” Sutherland as “a Judas wielding his murderous brush,” and concludes the whole work is “a betrayal of friendship, and an unpatriotic, treacherous, cowardly assault by the individualistic left!” The episode ends with Churchill’s wife Clementine (played by Harriet Walter) watching it burn on a bonfire outside their home.
Evidently, he was not a fan. This was the first time the painted study of Churchill by Sutherland, made in preparation of the portrait, had ever been auctioned. Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Sotheby’s While “The Crown” is not a documentary, it is true that the 80th birthday portrait —described by Churchill as “filthy and malignant” in a letter to his personal doctor — was burned.
“I think he was quite vain about his image,” Andre Zlattinger, Deputy Chairman UK and Head of Modern British & Irish Art at Sotheby’s, explained during a press briefing. “He’d had a stroke in 1953 so for him (how.
