Picture Post - 90 - Churchill At Chartwell - pub. 25th February 1939
British statesman Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965) at his country home in Chartwell, Kent, with Picture Post editor Stefan Lorant (1901 - 1997). Related photographs, also by Kurt Hutton,...
British statesman Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965) at his country home in Chartwell, Kent, with Picture Post editor Stefan Lorant (1901 - 1997). Related photographs, also by Kurt Hutton, were published in Picture Post - 90 - Churchill - 25th February 1939.
Stamped on the reverse: STEFAN LORANT COLLECTION and inscribed by Lorant: "1939 (before Feb. 25 from original negative" and "At Chartwell with Winston Churchill (vintage enlargement)".
Istvn Lrnt (Stefan Lorant), film maker, editor and writer is often regarded as the "godfather" of photo-journalism. Picture Post magazine, which he created, is today regarded as one of the iconic publications of the twentieth century.
Unlike other publications such as Illustrated London News, the Sphere, the Tatler, the Sketch, and the Bystander, Picture Post appealed to the common man. It launched in 1938 and within two years had reached a circulation of 1.7 million,
Winston Churchill was in the political wilderness when Lorant first met him early in 1939. They had lunch at Churchill's country house, Chartwell, and Lorant brought along Kurt Hutton to take photographs.
Churchill's subsequent exposure in Picture Post was instrumental in returning him to front line politics.
Lorant described how, at lunch, Churchill shovelled in a whole bowl of steak and kidney pie at the same time as sipping brandy, smoking a cigar and eating chocolate. Churchill did not speak a word while he ate: "It must have been half an hour though it seemed to me like days. He was in a world of his own."
In July 1940, uncomfortable at being an enemy alien at a time of war, Lorant left England for America. There he lived primarily as an author, often addressing American subjects. A year after his arrival, his pictorial biography on Abraham Lincoln (Lincoln, His Life in Photographs) was published. Other visual narratives on American historical subjects followed: The New World in 1946; The Presidency in 1951; biographies of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1950 and Theodore Roosevelt nine years later; The Glorious Burden in 1968, a history of American presidential elections from Washington to Carter; Pittsburgh, the Story of an American City in 1964.