(Updated January 2023) A half-length full-face portrait within a somewhat crudely executed painted circle (which is masked by a circular mount within the square frame). The sitter wears admiral's undress uniform, 1787-95 pattern, of a blue jacket with gold braid and his own white hair.

On 1 June 1794, in command of the Channel Fleet, he won the first fleet engagement of the French Revolutionary War, over 400 miles west of Ushant. The French were badly beaten with one ship sunk and six captured but the important grain convoy from America, which they had sailed to protect and the British to attack, slipped through to Brest. It was Lord Howe's last sea service. Three years later, in 1797, his enormous prestige as Admiral of the Fleet - there only being one at the time as the position of the Navy's senior admiral, not a rank - enabled him to negotiate a satisfactory end to the 'great mutiny' at Spithead. (That at the Nore was less peacfully resolved.)

The artist painted three copies of this portrait so that each of the sitter's daughters could have one. This one is thought to have belonged to his third daughter, Louisa Catherine, 1st Marchioness of Sligo, and descended in her family until purchased for the Museum in 1933. The prime version was painted, with a pendant pair of Admiral Samuel Barrington, to flank a panoramic view by Dominic Serres of Howe's 'Relief of Gibraltar', 1782, showing his fleet's arrival there, all three originally being part of the presentation of Copley's vast painting of the 'Siege of Gibraltar' now in the Guildhall Art Gallery. The American-born artist was active as a portrait painter in Boston until 1774. After a year of study in Italy and following the outbreak of the War of American Independence in 1775, he settled in London, where he spent the rest of his life. There he continued to paint portraits and innovatively combine portraiture with history painting. His intellectually gifted son (who had the same first names) was a lawyer and politician who served three terms as Lord Chancellor of England, and became 1st Baron Lyndhurst.