A three-quarter-length portrait to right wearing a black doublet, buff breeches, steel gorget and white collar. A gold medal inscribed with a ship, hangs round his neck on a black ribbon. His left hand rests on a gun barrel and his right arm is crooked, hand on hip, with a commander's a baton hanging from the gloved hand. In the right background an action with an English ship has been depicted.

The original portrait was painted in 1652-53 and was well known from an engraving. Tromp commanded the Dutch fleet in all the principal actions of the First Dutch War against the English, 1652-54. In 1653, he was killed in the final Dutch defeat off Scheveningen.

This portrait was presented to the Naval Gallery at Greenwich Hospital in 1833 by its founder, Edward Hawke Locker, Secretary and a Commissioner of the Hospital, one of a number of gifts he made to it. It is probably an early-19th-century copy from the engraving and one of several such portraits of notable historical figures in the Gallery, who were considered desirable for a representative collection but of whom original versions were unlikely to be found. In 1832, for example, Locker also presented one of Vasco da Gama, made by the contemporary Portuguese artist A.M. da Fonseca (BHC2702) from an original in Lisbon, and in 1838 one of Columbus, after an original by Parmigiano at Naples (BHC2627). It seems likely that he commissioned and paid for them himself since other modern versions of historical figures are credited to other donors; for example, H. P. Briggs's portrait of Robert Blake (BHC2558) presented in 1829 by Sir Robert Preston, then one of the Hospital Directors.