Arthur Stockdale Cope

At the Royal Academy summer exhibition of 1921 hung a canvas more than five metres wide showing 22 admirals of the First World War, gathered in the panelled Board Room of the Admiralty in Whitehall. Arthur Stockdale Cope painted a meeting that never took place. Three of the men, among them Rear-Admiral Horace Hood, killed at the battle of Jutland, had died in action before it was painted. The South African financier Sir Abe Bailey commissioned it together with two companion pieces, a group of generals by the American-born portraitist John Singer Sargent and a group of statesmen by the Scottish painter James Guthrie, and gave all three to the National Portrait Gallery.

Cope was born into painting. His father, Charles West Cope, was a Royal Academician known for history pictures, and the son entered the Royal Academy schools in 1874. He became one of the busiest society portraitists of his generation, painting Edward VII, George V and the German emperor Wilhelm II, and he was knighted in 1917. He also ran a painting school in South Kensington, where the young Vanessa Bell, later a central figure of the Bloomsbury group of writers and artists, was among his pupils.

The naval picture spent decades in storage until a restoration returned it to public view in 2014, for the centenary of the war's outbreak.