This is a late19th-century copy of a portrait by John Theodore Heins (1697-1756) of Nelson's mother, Catherine Suckling, when she was 18 and just before she met and married the Reverend Edmund Nelson, then rector of Hilborough, Norfolk. A woman of firm character, she bore him eleven children, but her health was not strong. She died aged 42 when her son Horatio was nine, leaving him and his two elder and two younger brothers, and three sisters, to be brought up by their widowed father. Heins was a German portrait painter who settled in Norwich in 1720 and painted many local people, notable and otherwise. His identification as painter of the original of Catherine Nelson (which was possibly also smaller) is based on an old published reproduction of it, but its present whereabouts are uncertain.

This is one of a number of copy portraits of Nelson's immediate family made in the 19th century to hang at Trafalgar House, Wiltshire, the estate of the Earls Nelson of whom the first was the Revd William Nelson, elder brother of the admiral after the latter was posthumously awarded the title as a family honour. With related original portraits all were purchased from Trafalgar House in 1948. The copy group comprises Nelson's maternal grandfather and grandmother, the Revd Maurice and Mrs Anne Suckling, nee Turner (BHC0344, BHC0343); his mother Catherine (the present picture, BHC2879) and her brother Maurice (BHC3045): the original family portraits also acquired from Trafalgar House at the same time were Nelson's paternal grandfather and grandmother, the Revd Edmund Nelson senior and Mrs Mary Nelson, nee Bland (BHC2880, BHC2882) and his father the Revd Edmund Nelson junior by Sir William Beechey (BHC2881). [amended PvdM 7/09, 5/15].