Arthur Pan was born in 1894, in Hungary. He studied art at the Budapest Academy of Art, before going to Paris, in order to enroll at the highly distinguished Academie Julian. Pan soon went to England, fleeing from the Nazis. The artist worked mainly on oil. As a portraitist, he painted several important historical characters, surely his most celebrated portrait is of Sir Winston Churchill. He also depicted several distinguished military leaders, such as Field Marshal Jan Smuts and Lieutenant-General Sir Miles Dempsey, who was the Commander of the British Second Army, as well as the first British Army commander to cross the Rhine. Arthur Pan was most productive between 1920 to 1960. During the 1950s, the artist lived in Baghdad for two years, at the Palace of King Faisal II of Iraq, the country’s very last King. Pan was working under commission to produce portraits of the Iraqi Royal Family. All these portraits were destroyed during the coup d’etat of July 1958 in Iraq, carried out along with the execution of the very people depicted in those canvases. One his portrait of Sir Winston Churchill was auctioned in 1981, as for his most famous, the executed in 1943, during World War II, now hangs at American Embassy in London. Another of Pan’s portraits of Churchill, made during the Second World War, is now hanging at the American Embassy in London. Arthur Pan died in 1960.