The 'tufted eyebrows’, monocle, and ‘sharply chiselled features’, recalled by the subject's friend, caricaturist Max Beerbohm, and featured in Mark Wayner’s caricature of Sir Edward ‘Eddie’ Marsh (1872-1953), make his subject instantly recognisable: a prominent civil servant, who served for 23 years as personal private secretary to Winston Churchill, Marsh was also a scholar and noted patron of the arts. He used his so-called ‘murder money’ (an allowance made to him as a descendant of the assassinated Prime Minister Spencer Perceval) to support the arts, publishing three anthologies of Georgian poets including Rupert Brooke (for whom he acted as executor). He supported many painters, particularly, John Currie and Mark Gertler, as well as John and Paul Nash, Isaac Rosenberg, and Stanley Spencer, among others, papering his Gray’s Inn apartment floor to ceiling with their works.