Ufficiali di marina della prima guerra mondiale

In 1921, three years after the guns stopped, a South African mining millionaire named Abraham Bailey paid for three enormous group portraits to fix the leaders of the war on canvas, the generals, the statesmen, and this one, the admirals. Cope gathered 22 senior Royal Navy officers into the Admiralty boardroom in Whitehall, most of them men who had commanded fleets far apart rather than posed together in a room. The picture is over five metres wide. Its size and fragile condition kept it off the walls for decades, rolled and out of sight, until it was cleaned and rehung in 2014 for the centenary of the war it records.