a cast silver miniature bust, Asprey & Co. Ltd., London, 1973, signed 'NEMON' to reverse, also stamped 'ASPREY / LONDON', set on a slope fronted green onyx plinth, bust 4.5cm high, 9cm overall

Nemon and Churchill first met in 1951 at ‘La Mamounia’, the famous hotel in Marrakech. Lady Churchill, on later seeing a clay bust of her husband, which Nemon had secretly modelled in his hotel bedroom, wrote to him that ‘it represents to me my husband as I see him and as I think of him, and I would like to have it just as it is.’ A friendship blossomed between the artist and the couple, Nemon producing over two dozen versions of the great man, including in 1969 the large bronze featuring in the Member’s Lobby of the Commons, as well as the group of Sir Winston and Lady Churchill titled ‘Married Love’, a version of which can be seen at Chartwell. The only man apparently to sculpt Churchill from life, Nemon recorded in an unpublished memoir that his subject could be ‘bellicose, challenging, and deliberately provocative’, although an interviewer later reported that the artist felt the results were ‘not merely a likeness, but a biography of his life’. (https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/nemon-sculpture/ - accessed 20.09.2023)

Nemon appears to have collaborated with Asprey's to produce two editions of this bust, once in gold in 1967 followed by one in silver in 1973, the silver versions more finely modelled than the earlier gold examples. For another silver bust see Henry Aldridge & Son Ltd., Devizes, 19 January 2019, lot 399 and for a gold example Bonham's, London, 27 January 2015, lot 273.