The portrait that Churchill couldn’t face
Winston Churchill was no Adonis but most of his portraitists did what they could to flatter him. However, when the British artist Graham Sutherland (1903–80) was commissioned to paint a full-length portrait of Churchill in 1954 for 1,000 guineas (about £27,000 today), paid by the House of Commons and the House of Lords, and to be presented in a lavish public ceremony, things did not go well. Sutherland was chosen not by Churchill but by members of the Houses of Parliament in honour of his 80th birthday. Churchill asked to be portrayed in his Knight of the Garter robes but the commissioners specified he be portrayed as he most commonly
