Portrait of the artist as a young man

Had the artist Rex Whistler not been killed in Normandy in 1944 at the age of 39, in what direction would his great talent have gone? It is futile to speculate, write Hugh and Mirabel Cecil, the authors of this sumptuously illustrated new biography. But many did. Cecil Beaton thought he would have become another Turner. My mother Caroline Paget, his greatest love (but who loved him without the intensity that he loved her), thought he would have become one of the greatest portraitists of the 20th century and, relishing new ideas in stage design, also one of the most famous designers of his day. All his friends thought that soldiering had changed both him and his art. His work, so often fanciful, rococo and gorgeous, became increasingly darker and more naturalistic.

Rex (he was killed five years before I was born, but he was talked about with so much love all through my childhood that I feel we are on Christian-name terms) was born in 1905, into the respectable middle class, no relation to the celebrated James McNeill.