‘You must’, wrote the Tate Gallery director John Rothenstein to his professional acquaintance E.M.O’R. Dickey in May 1941, “forgive my bombarding you with names of artists for whom opportunities might be found for doing something in connexion with the nation’s war records’. Rothenstein then noted that he had recently received a letter from Alan Sorrell: ‘a most competent artist’ and one ‘not wanting in imagination’.