Simon Schama - The Face of Britain, BBC1 8 pm Tuesday

His wife hated it also and cremated it in the garden . It was also not well received by the British public who thought it an insult to our hero Winnie and too arty farty and needed to be " Understood and explained".....Syd

It was a great portrait, but showed Churchill as old and glowering - both of which he was. Destroying it was an appalling act of vandalism. Churchill had almost nothing in common with Hitler, other than that both regarded themselves as artists, with Churchill's claim being the stronger (it's hard to prove the provenance of Hitler paintings: there are so many fakes; it seems he was OK as an architectural illustrator - but his paintings were uniformly dull, brownish, and the people were always out of scale to the buildings. So - we should have known!). More seriously - Churchill had a vision of himself which Sutherland's painting didn't fit. Parliament could have resolved this problem by a) selecting a more anodyne portraitist who would have flattered the vain old thing, b) actually consulting him in the process of painting it - it would rapidly have become apparent that he just didn't like Sutherland's work, and they could have aborted the process. He was after all under no obligation to like it - springing it on him as a surprise was not the greatest idea government ever had. There have been other prime ministerial portraits - eg the excellent one of Harold Wilson, little eyes glinting at us through pipe smoke: I suspect Harold had better taste than Winston, because he liked his portrait. And there have been some monumentally dull ones - is there a good portrait anywhere of Margaret Thatcher, or John Major? If so, I've not seen it - there's a quite horrible one of Thatcher by the US artist Nelson Shanks, which makes her look as if she's just eaten a baby.... And then there's Jonathan Yeo's portrait of Tony Blair - competent, slick, and one of the most soulless things I've ever seen executed in paint (I'm not making a political point there, tempted though I am). There is a rather good portrait of Harold MacMillan - in fact there are two; one, when he was a young man, by William Orpen; the other in old age - and I can't remember the portraitist, but it was a sensitive study of a complex man. Other statesman portraits have survived intact - but then the others were less concerned by the granite image Churchill's many admirers expected; and it's suggested that he saw in the portrait the crumbling and encroaching senility he so feared and hated it because he hated what was happening to himself. Well, one could understand that - in his place, though, I think I'd just have commissioned another portrait! Given there are so many photographs of it, many of them extremely good, the painting could be reconstructed - it wouldn't have any commercial value of course, but it would be fun for someone to do..... then you could pretend Lady Churchill hadn't had it singed at all: you had it, all the time! I think Sutherland was a bit overwhelmed by Churchill and painted him as battered but defiant - an act of hero-worship perhaps gone a bit wrong. His portrait of W Somerset Maugham showed what he could do when he was more relaxed (even if someone did unkindly describe it as looking like a mischievous Mandarin). But you shouldn't burn paintings even if you are married to a great man, any more than you should burn books.

I much prefer the Sutherland portrait to either of the other two - the first made him look like a fat old drunk hardly able to fit into his suit, the second - an image I've seen before - was more competently painted but the equivalent in paint of hagiography: was Churchill really so hungry for affection that he would have preferred either of these to Sutherland's portrait, which was by comparison elemental? You say, Syd, that it makes him look like a worn out old man - but that he wasn't. Well - he was 80; he'd had two strokes and a coronary by this time: whether that makes you worn out I wouldn't (yet) know, but if he was hoping to be painted as 20 years younger, as a man still in the prime of life rather than an extinct volcano, the problem is obvious: he was clapped out but desperate to avoid acknowledging the fact. He should never have formed his second government - he wasn't up to it, and had to be led gently away by his colleagues: an unnecessarily sad end, but one he wished on himself by just refusing to admit the ravages of time had left him so weakened. Said it before, but will say it again: I think the only thing wrong with Sutherland's portrait was that he was led astray by hero worship to paint a monument rather than a man, and in so doing he revealed more than his subject wanted. The Sutherland is a worthy successor to the only other great portrait of Churchill I know, that by William Orpen, painted when he was in the wilderness and reflecting it in his eyes. Portraiture should try to tell the truth, or it's worthless: Sutherland may have failed, but it was an heroic failure - Churchill was too much the politician and too little the artist to appreciate it.

Wonder what Sutherland would do with a portrait of Robert Peston in a part dressed slouch?

I haven't painted a portrait in some 40 years - drawn a few, but that's not the same thing at all. I'd rather like to paint Robert Peston - all those bony angles and neck sinews revealed by a) the open neck shirt, b) the slouch, which puts a strain on them.

Go for it Robert