Oil painting of the battleship HMS 'Valiant' (1914), running at speed in a moderate sea in the 1920s. The ship was one of the 'Queen Elizabeth' class of five super-dreadnoughts put into commission in 1915-16 and generally considered the first fast battleships: the others were 'Queen Elizabeth', 'Warspite' (Admiral Cunningham's Mediterranean flagship in the Second World War), 'Malaya' and 'Barham' - whose loss to submarine attack in November 1941 is spectacularly recorded in a piece of documentary film that shows her capsizing and exploding with heavy casualties. Their maximum speed was 24 knots - considerable for a vessel over 640 feet long by 90 in the beam and at full load displacing 36,500 tons. They were superior in all points to the Navy's preceding Iron Duke-class and earlier German ships such as the König-class: German Bayern-class ships were comparable but 2 knots slower. The 'QE's' were the first battleships to be armed with 15-inch guns as primary armament (8 = 4 x 2) and they served successfully in combat in both World Wars, with only 'Barham' lost. The other four were scrapped by the end of 1948.

This image is of 'Valiant' in 1920-21 when serving as the flagship of the 1st Battle Squadron of the Atlantic Fleet. She was the only ship of the class at this time that had a covered bridge. In 1919-20 the rear-admiral's flag shown was flown from a short topmast above the foretop but this was moved to the mainmast in 1920. Note the two range clocks on the foremast above the bridge. She has a Sopwith aircraft (Camel, Pup or Ship Strutter) on a flying-off platform on the B-turret roof. A destroyer of the Admiralty M or Admiralty R classes is on the left.

Pears (1873-1958), the painter, was both in the Marines and an official war artist to the Admiralty during the First World War: during the Second he worked for the War Artists Advisory Committee. Like the older W. L. Wyllie and others he was both a painter and popular illustrator working successfully for magazines and in book illustration, a keen yachtsman, and first President of the Royal Society of Marine Artists.