(Updated, July 2022). A half-length portrait facing to the left, in a black coat, within a painted oval. The sitter was the youngest son of Captain William Locker (1731-1800), ultimately the Lieutenant-Governor of Greenwich Hospital. Educated at Eton, he entered the civil side of the Navy and in 1804 became secretary to Admiral Sir Edward Pellew (later Viscount Exmouth) a post he retained until 1814. In 1819 he became secretary of Greenwich Hospital and civil commissioner in 1829, until his retirement on health grounds in autumn 1843. The cause was what we would today call the onset of Alzheimer's disease and from June 1844, with the support of Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, he was granted a pension of £500 p.a. for his long public service. Locker was a major reformer of Hospital affairs, and a significant establishment figure with many friends in artistic and literary circles including Robert Southey, Sir Walter Scott and Sir Thomas Lawrence. He was one of the founders of the Athenaeum Club in London and in the early 1820s also founded a counter-radical journal called 'The Plain Englishman'. In 1823-24 he carried through the project originally thought of by his father to have a 'national gallery' of naval pictures and portraiture in the Painted Hall at Greenwich. Its opening in April 1824 predated that of the Angerstein Collection in Pall Mall (the founding core of the National Gallery) by about three weeks, making it the first national historical gallery in England. From 1829 on, the town centre of Greenwich as it largely survives today was rebuilt according to an outline he proposed to the Hospital board in 1825. This portrait was presented to Greenwich Hospital by his family in 1872. He is also shown as a younger man, with others of his family, in H.P Briggs's painting of George III presenting Lord Howe with a sword on the 'Queen Charlotte' after the Battle of 1 June 1794 (BHC0476).