Winston Churchill's blazing orange and lavender Moroccan landscape, ``Sunset over Atlas Mountains, Marrakech,'' sold for $420,000 today at Bonhams in New York.The impressionistic painting, made during a 1935 Moroccan holiday, was estimated to sell for up to $600,000. It was bought by an anonymous phone bidder.Churchill started painting around 1915, a hobby which helped him relax.``If it wasn't for painting I couldn't live. I couldn't bear the strain of things'' he wrote in his 1948 book, ``Painting as a Pastime.''The British wartime leader, whose canvases elicited praise from Pablo Picasso and President Dwight D. Eisenhower, has emerged recently as an auction hotshot.Last July, his bucolic ``Chartwell Landscape with Sheep,'' with rolling green hills and fluffy white sheep, sold for a record $2.03 million at Sotheby's in London, more than five times the high estimate.`Sunset'' didn't fetch its high estimate because ``as glorious as the colors were and the historic legend of it, it doesn't have that glow,'' said James R. Borynack, chief executive of Wally Findlay Galleries International. The sale price includes a commission.Churchill refused to sell his paintings during his 40-year career, preferring to give them to friends and children. He died in 1965.Popular in U.S.Seventy-seven of his estimated 500 paintings have been offered at auction since 1985, according to the auction result tracker Artnet.A daughter, Lady Sarah Audley, inherited ``Sunset,'' which sold several times before appearing at Bonhams.Churchill was England's World War II prime minister, serving from 1940 until 1945 and then 1951 to 1955. He was an honorary member of London's Royal Academy, where he had a one-man show in 1959.His crowd-pleasing pictures went on a nine-city tour across the U.S. and Canada in 1958 in an exhibition organized by the Smithsonian Institution.