A three-quarter length, nearly full-face portrait showing McKay seated cross-legged on a red upholstered chair to the left, wearing a brown waistcoat and trousers, and a black cutaway coat and overcoat. His right hand is on an open book on a table covered with a red cloth to his right and his left hand is in in trouser pocket. He has a full set of ‘mutton-chop’ sideburns. Probably painted from a photograph of about 1855.
Donald McKay was a shipbuilder famed for the design of speedy clipper ships. He moved from Canada to New York in the mid-1820s before relocating to Boston, where he established his yard in 1845. Among the extreme clippers he built were the ‘Flying Cloud’ (1851), which made the passage from New York to San Francisco via Cape Horn in 89 days, and the ‘Lightning’ (1854), which achieved a record run of 436 nautical miles in 24 hours on her maiden voyage to Liverpool.