Full credit to Jonathan Black for spotting a significant gap in the exhaustive, indeed excessive, literature on Winston Churchill: his changing image in art. This book admirably qualifies as “iconography” not only as art historians mean it – the pictorial material illustrating a particular subject – but also as a scholarly yet page-turning study of a veritable twentieth-century icon.

From the time when the “Young Winston” was present at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898 to Gerald Scarfe’s cruelly Gollum-like portrait of the 90-year-old MP on his last day in the House of Commons, Churchill was a source of visual fascination to artists in all media.