The museum bought it for a few hundred pounds from Earl Nelson, the admiral’s descendant, in 1948. By the age of 21, Nelson had been appointed a captain and put in charge of his own frigate.It is thought that Captain Locker, anticipating that Nelson would go far, asked that the work be updated and formalised.Curators discovered the earlier portrait when they took the painting down for cleaning last month. He is wearing a plain lieutenant’s coat and strikes the casual pose of a young, untried officer. In the later portrait, painted on top of the earlier one after Nelson had proved himself in battle, he is a leaner, more self-assured figure wearing a formal captain’s uniform with epaulettes, gold braid and a tricorn hat.The hidden portrait was commissioned in 1777 when Nelson was an obscure 18-year-old lieutenant, and changed four years later into the much grander work after Nelson returned victorious from the Nicaraguan “San Juan” campaign against the Spanish. Mr Lomas is claiming £5m for loss of donations, on behalf of the charity, together with £8m for loss of income to the hospital’s Samaritan Fund and £10m in damages.. Portraiture/ hidden image

THE MOST famous portrait of Lord Nelson hides the image of a younger and less important Nelson underneath, restoration work at the National Maritime Museum has shown.
The “promotion” of the portrait – from a hatless figure to hatted, and from a lieutenant’s uniform to a captain’s – followed the sudden rise in Horatio Nelson’s fortunes as a young naval officer.Both images were painted by John Francis Rigaud at the request of one of Nelson’s early commanders, Captain William Locker, more than 20 years before Nelson was killed at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.The earlier portrait, discovered when curators X-rayed the painting, shows a young man with a chubby face, a pigtail and a hat under his arm.

The hospital, with its nursing home for 166 and 8.5 acres of private gardens, was put on sale for £15m.Mr Brooks was forced to abandon his legal bid to stop the sale. Mr Lomas said last week that he had taken up the cudgels on behalf of the hospital charity, his fellow governors, and Freemasonry.His writ claims that Grand Lodge deliberately tried to deprive the hospital of donations and destroy the hospital charity. Mr Brooks and his fellow governors were furious when they heard the firm’s proposal that the Royal Masonic it be sold.Last December, after much wrangling, a mass meeting of masons voted to close the hospital and wind up the charity that runs it. Mr Brooks last year produced a costed proposal for running the Royal Masonic profitably.But by then the Charity Commission had called in accountants Coopers and Lybrand to act as receiver and sort out the hospital’s cash problem. Grand Lodge said that, in return for substantial sums from masonry’s Grand Charity, the hospital was expected to accept a new constitution allowing the duke to appoint a chairman and four members of the board.The hospital’s board rejected this. Almost immediately the Duke of Kent resigned as the hospital’s president and Prince Michael of Kent, the Provincial Grand-Master for Middlesex, resigned as vice-president.The hospital was racked by a series of controversies as it was revealed that its finance director was an undisclosed bankrupt, that various members of the senior management had been dismissed amid allegations of misdemeanours, and that the staff pension fund was millions of pounds “adrift”.Throughout this bitter wrangling, a group of governors, led by vice-patron Douglas Brooks, fought to keep the hospital open.

More than 300,000 masons and masonic organisations around the world were balloted. The opponents won and Grand Lodge was forced to concede defeat. By 1988/9 annual losses had climbed to around £2m and the Duke of Kent, president of the hospital and England’s most senior Freemason, commissioned a report by management consultants Touche Ross.Its findings, at a cost of £100,000, were that although the hospital had started to look to private patients it would have to abandon its masonic connections and change completely to private work.The report, published in 1990, said the hospital needed £9.7m over the next three years. In 1978 it started to take non-masons as private patients to try to improve its finances. In 1984 an American health company unsuccessfully bid £20m for the hospital.In 1986, with Grand Lodge tiring of embarrassing adverse publicity, members of the hospital’s management, backed by some of the highest-ranking masons, tried to sell it.Opponents among the governors took their case to the High Court, which ordered a ballot of those who had contributed to the hospital financially. Its188 beds made it the largest independent acute hospital in Europe, providing high standards of private health care for “paying masons of moderate means” at only the net cost of treatment.But with low bed occupancy and modern private hospitals opening in London, the Royal Masonic ran into serious financial problems.