January 1, 1970

It was while in Morocco for the Casablanca conference that Churchill painted his only painting of the War. Following the demands of the conference and perhaps in celebration that the tense meeting was over, he insisted on taking President Roosevelt to Marrakech to watch the sunset. After Roosevelt’s departure he painted The Tower of Katoubia, later giving it to the President.

Churchill had long been a champion of a Mediterranean strategy – he referred to it as attacking the enemy’s ‘soft underbelly’ – and capitalized on the success in north Africa to push on to invade Sicily and, eventually, Italy in 1943. But his allies didn’t agree with this strategy. Despite Churchill’s concerns that this would be too ambitious – and too soon – Roosevelt and Stalin, particularly the latter, pressed for a massive cross-channel invasion of France to attack Germany head-on and in the end, given the scale of the Russian and American contribution, Churchill had to capitulate. He was now coming to realize that, of the ‘big three’, he was the smallest.