Byron Birdsall's first portrait of Winston Churchill (1874-1965), which shows him painting the Churchill Peaks of Mt. McKinley, North America's highest mountain, was painted in 2000 to mark the 17th International Churchill Conference in Anchorage. The conference was organized by the Churchill Center in Washington, D.C., with assistance from the Department of Political Science at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. The painting is privately owned and reproduced on our home page by permission of the owner.

In addition to his long political career of service in every important cabinet office except the foreign ministry and his shelfful of books, for which he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, Churchill was an avid painter, producing more than 500 canvases. The statesman never visited Alaska, but if he had, he might have been hard put to resist setting up his easel in such a "paintaceous" land to capture the mountain whose twin peaks were named in his honor after his death in 1965. Birdsall's portrait is in water colors, but the painting within a painting is in oils, Churchill's favored medium.

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Byron Birdsall is one of Alaska's foremost living painters. He was born in 1937 in Buckeye, Arizona, where his father preached to one of the smallest Free Methodist congregations in the southwest. He grew up in Los Angeles, then attended Seattle Pacific College and Stanford University, lived in East Africa and Pago Pago, American Samoa, and travelled extensively before settling in Alaska in 1975. High-quality prints of this painting are available from Artique Ltd. in Anchorage.

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