Winston Churchill’s only wartime painting put up for sale by Angelina Jolie

Tower of the Koutoubia Mosque is being sold by Angelina Jolie

Credit: AP

Angelina Jolie, the actress, is to sell Winston Churchill’s only wartime painting, which is expected to fetch a record sum, after splitting up the art collection she shared with her former husband Brad Pitt, the actor.

Churchill created more than 500 works but the only one he painted during the Second World War was a Moroccan landscape, composed after the 1943 Casablanca Conference for President Franklin D Roosevelt, his friend and ally.

Tower of the Koutoubia Mosque, depicting sunset over Marrakesh, was sold by Roosevelt’s son and ultimately bought by Jolie and Pitt.

Five years after the pair agreed to divorce, Jolie is auctioning the piece through Christie’s in London. It is expected to sell for £2.5 million, a record for a Churchill work.

The oil on canvas has been called his "best painting" and symbolic of the close relationship between the prime minister and his US counterpart.

After agreeing in Casablanca to push for the Axis forces’ unconditional surrender, Churchill invited Roosevelt to witness a sunset in Marrakesh, then captured the scene in the painting.

Churchill gifted the painting to Roosevelt

Credit: BETTMANN

Nick Orchard, an expert in modern art who is overseeing the Christie’s sale, said: "It is the only work Churchill painted during the war, perhaps encouraged by the recent progress made by the Allies in what he considered to be one of the most beautiful countries he had encountered.

"Tower of the Koutoubia Mosque is therefore arguably the best painting by Winston Churchill, due to the significance of the subject matter to him and the fact that it highlights the importance of the friendship between the two leaders."

On Roosevelt’s death in 1945, The Tower of Katoubia Mosque passed to his son Elliot, who sold it in 1950 to a private collector. It was then sold to the producer of a 1964 documentary on Churchill, called The Finest Hours.

In 2011, Pitt and Jolie bought the work from a New Orleans antiques dealer to add to their £18 million art collection, partly housed at their Château Miraval residence in France, before agreeing to divorce in 2016.

Jolie, the cover star of this month’s British Vogue magazine, has not made public the arrangements for the artworks following the couple’s separation, and their representatives have not commented on the sale.

Jolie is on the cover of the March issue of British Vogue, available via digital download and news-stands from Friday

Credit: VOGUE

The £2.5 million price forecast would be a record for a Churchill painting, reflecting the rarity of the wartime piece and its historical significance.

Prices for the wartime leader’s paintings have increased recently, with some experts suggesting his sympathetic ­portrayal in the Netflix hit The Crown may have sparked a new market for his works.

A painting of goldfish at his Chartwell home sold for £1.8 million in 2014, and an oil and canvas depicting his favourite Johnnie Walker whisky sold for £983,000 last year.