A full-length portrait to the right showing Durham in his admiral’s full-dress uniform of the 1843-47 pattern, wearing the ribbon, star and chain of the GCB, the Trafalgar medal and the ribbon and star of a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Military Merit, apparently the only British officer to receive this French honour. At his side is the sword presented to him by Trinidad in 1816. He stands on the shore holding his hat in his right hand with his left arm resting on his telescope. A rocky outcrop is shown to the right; the sea to the left. The painting is signed and dated: ‘John Wood pinx 1844’.

Philip Charles Durham entered the Navy on 1 May 1777 in the ‘Trident’ (he only later adopted the forenames Henderson and Calderwood owing to inheritances). He was subsequently in the 'Edgar' until July 1781 when appointed acting-lieutenant in the ‘Victory, to which her former captain, Richard Kempenfelt, returned from brief command of the 'Britannia' to hoist his flag as a rear-admiral that September. Durham then followed him into the ‘Royal George’ in March 1782 and when that ship sank from structural failure while being heeled for repairs in Spithead on 29 August that year, Durham was officer of the watch on deck. That saved his life though he spent an hour in the water before being rescued. He was confirmed as lieutenant only in December 1782 and promoted to Commander in 1790. In that rank, commanding the 'Spitfire' (20 guns), he put to sea on 12 February 1793 and on the 13th captured the French privateer ‘Afrique’, the first naval prize taken in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. He rose to post-captain in frigates from June that year, with continuing success, and was slightly wounded at Trafalgar in 1805, by then commanding the 74-gun 'Defiance'. Ten years later, as a rear-admiral, he capped his distinction of taking the first prize of the French wars by also securing the last, this time the island of Guadeloupe, which surrendered to his squadron on 10 August 1815.

Durham married in 1817 but had no children and little further service, his promotions thereafter being by seniority on half-pay, augmenting the considerable fortune he had made in prize money. He was MP for Queenborough from 1830 (when he also reached the rank of full admiral) and for Devizes, 1834-36, but then stood down on appointment as Commander-in-Chief at Portsmouth, 1836-39. Durham's wife died suddenly late in 1844 - the year this portrait was painted - and on his death from bronchitis at Naples in April 1845 his estates passed to his niece.

The artist, John Wood (1801-70) was a respectable London painter and Royal Academy exhibitor of historical and biblical subjects, and of portraits, though the quality of his work declined with his health in later life. This is an impressive large-scale example, which was shown at the RA in 1845 - just after Durham's death - and presented to the Naval Gallery at Greenwich Hospital by James Wolfe Murray (1814-90) in 1847. When the NMM opened in 1937, it was the first painting the public saw on entering the main galleries via the Caird Entrance, under the west colonnade.