People: May 18, 1970

Winston Churchill retouching Peter Paul Rubens? During the war, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson told a TV interviewer, it happened to a painting by Rubens and Artist Frans Snyders that hangs at the P.M.'s country house, Chequers. Although the canvas was supposed to depict Aesop's fable of the lion and the mouse, Churchill could barely discern the mouse. One day he took brush in hand to highlight it. "But it's still difficult to see," Wilson admitted. Would he try to improve it further? "I wouldn't touch up a Rubens " said Wilson, "still less...

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