£420,000 for Churchill painting

AN OIL painting by Winston Churchill has raised more than £420,000 at auction.

The Giza Pyramids at Cairo, painted in 1946 and marked with the initials WSC, was given by Churchill to his friend General Jan Christian Smuts, a South African statesman who served as a British field marshal in the Second World War. It passed through his family before being sold to an anonymous buyer in 1999, who auctioned it yesterday at Christie's in London, where it went for 421,250.