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Artist Withdraws Video Installation from National Portrait Gallery After Protest by Peers
Helen Cammock removed her 40-minute work Persistence on 22 June 2026 after a letter from historian Andrew Roberts protested its portrayal of Winston Churchill's role in the 1943 Bengal famine. The National Portrait Gallery said it respects the decision. The piece had been on display for 10 months.
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Helen Cammock withdrew her 40-minute video installation Persistence from the National Portrait Gallery on 22 June 2026. The work had been on temporary display for 10 months as part of the exhibition Artists First: Contemporary Perspectives on Portraiture and was scheduled to remain until August.
The video claimed that Winston Churchill used wilful mass starvation as part of the Bengal famine in 1943 and compared Oliver Cromwell's 17th-century campaigns in Ireland to Churchill's actions.
An estimated three million people died in eastern India during the famine. Andrew Roberts wrote a letter to Professor Shearer West, interim chair of the board of trustees, protesting the installation. Roberts described the accusation against Churchill as a foul and vile barefaced lie.
More than 50 members of the House of Lords countersigned the letter, including Winston Churchill's grandson Nicholas Soames and Michael Hintze, a former trustee of the gallery from 2017 to 2021. Roberts stated that a typhoon on 16 October 1942 destroyed rice crops and road and rail links, causing the famine.
He noted that Churchill told the war cabinet the hard pressures of world war have brought conditions of scarcity, verging in some localities into actual famine, upon India, and that Churchill asked President Roosevelt and the prime ministers of Canada and Australia to send hundreds of thousands of tonnes of grain.
Cammock, a Turner Prize-winning artist who developed the piece with the gallery since 2023, stated that the work is not a documentary but a creative work that explores ideas and thoughts in response to the National Portrait Gallery, its collection and its archives.
