Interior of the Painted Hall, Greenwich Hospital
Interior of the Painted Hall, Greenwich Hospital
This is the first known painting of the National Gallery of Naval Art, installed in the Painted Hall at Greenwich Hospital in 1824. The painting is an evocative image of this important site of national memory, which commemorated the role of the navy—and, especially, its elite officers—in protecting the nation. Framing the foreground are two monumental paintings recently donated to the gallery by George IV, depicting the first and last major naval conflicts of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. On the left is Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg’s Earl Howe’s Victory over the French Fleet of 1795, celebrating the Battle of the First of June, and on the right, J. M. W. Turner’s Battle of Trafalgar of 1824. These images of actions are complemented by images of two of the officers who fought in them: Admiral Lord Nelson (right) and Admiral Adam Duncan, first Viscount Duncan (left). The portraits hanging to either side of the stairs celebrate exploration. To the left hangs a portrait of Admiral George Anson, Lord Anson, famous for circumnavigating the globe, and to the right, one of Captain James Cook, who explored the Pacific islands. On the left stands a pensioner of African descent, possibly John Deman, who served with Nelson in the West Indies. In the distance, two figures contemplate a smaller-scale marine painting, of the type commissioned by Anson and other naval officers in the eighteenth century. In the wake of the Napoleonic wars, such images were not forgotten, but rather integrated into a larger public statement of the history of the navy at the very site where, 150 years earlier, the arrival of the Van de Veldes had ignited the British tradition of marine painting.