The Atlantic Charter

In August 1941 Franklin Roosevelt told the press he was going fishing, boarded the presidential yacht Potomac and quietly transferred to the heavy cruiser USS Augusta. Winston Churchill crossed the Atlantic in the battleship HMS Prince of Wales. They met in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, on August 9 — the first time the two men had sat down together as leaders.

On Sunday the 10th the crews of both ships gathered on the quarterdeck of Prince of Wales for a joint service under the fourteen-inch guns. Four days later the two governments issued an eight-point statement of shared aims: no territorial gain, self-determination, freedom of the seas, and the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny.

The United States was still neutral. Four months later it was not, and on December 10 Prince of Wales went down off Malaya under Japanese bombers.

The whole painting turns on a single gesture — Roosevelt's raised hand mid-sentence, Churchill leaning in to catch it, cigar forgotten between his fingers. Everything else waits. Admirals and generals stand at parade rest along the rail in navy and tropical white, and the gun turret above them is out of focus, a gray shape that says where this is without saying more. The light is flat northern overcast. Notice how the two chairs are angled toward each other, not toward the camera.