Despite initial reservations; “the crowds, the smells and the general discomfort for painting have repelled me”; he stayed for three weeks and came to love the city he termed ‘The Paris of the Sahara’.

[a][3] Finding it conducive both to work and to painting, he wrote to his wife, Clementine, recording the newspaper articles and book chapters dictated, and the seven pictures completed among “brilliant sunshine, translucent air and swarms of picturesque inhabitants”.

[4] After the Casablanca Conference, some seven years later, he persuaded an initially reluctant Roosevelt to accompany him on a trip to Marrakech.

[6] Martin Gilbert, in the 7th volume of his authorised biography, Road To Victory: Winston S. Churchill: 1941-1945, records it as "the only picture he painted during the whole war".

[7] Churchill himself described the event in the fourth volume of his memoirs of the Second World War, The Hinge of Fate; “I returned to the Villa Taylor, where I spent another two days in correspondence with the War Cabinet about my future movements, and painting from the tower the only picture I ever attempted during the war.”[8] Tower of the Koutoubia Mosque was later given to President Roosevelt as a birthday present.

Hickman was a financier, collector and film producer, who had worked on The Finest Hours, a documentary on Churchill’s life.