Hommes d'État de la Première Guerre mondiale

The scene never happened. These 17 statesmen who led Britain and its dominions through the First World War never actually gathered in one grand hall. Sir James Guthrie assembled them there on canvas, painting each man separately in sittings held over the springs of 1919 to 1921, then fitting the portraits together into a single imagined room. The South African financier Abe Bailey had commissioned it as a memorial to wartime leadership. Among the figures stands the Maharaja of Bikaner, the only Indian to sign the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. Guthrie worked at it for more than a decade and died in September 1930, months after it first went on show in Edinburgh, before he could add the last finishing touches.