Portrait.

Stipple engraving. A print after the three-quarter length portrait by Rigaud painted between 1777 and 1781 (BHC2901). This shows Nelson to right in captain’s full-dress uniform 1774-87. He wears a hat and his hands rest on his sheathed sword in front of him. Although the portrait was begun in 1777 when Nelson was a lieutenant, it was not finished until 1781 when he returned to England as a captain. It was one of three portraits of promising young officers commissioned by their early commander, Captain William Locker, Nelson's old captain in the ‘Lowestoffe’. The background shows Fort San Juan, Nicaragua, which Nelson helped capture in 1780, and is believed to have been painted by Dominic Serres whom Locker also patronized.

Rigaud was born in Turin and studied there, in Florence and Bologna, and lived in Rome for two years from 1768. In 1771 he settled in London, becoming an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1772 and a full Academician in 1784. He received a steady stream of commissions for historical subjects, as well as decorative compositions and portraits. He was one of the major painters of large-scale decorative schemes for fashionable interiors of the late 18th century. As a portrait artist, he could be frank and expressive when not seeking heroic effects. The original portrait is signed and inscribed ‘Capt. Horatio Nelson 1781’.

When Nelson’s celebrity after the Battle of St Vincent in February 1797 prompted a demand for images of him, Locker lent the portrait to the engraver Robert Shipster of George Street, Woolwich, who issued this print that August. He has placed the image in an oval, without the landscape background of the original and misdated the Rigaud image as 1786.