This is a ship portrait, pictured from close underneath the bow but in isometric perspective for use in the middle-distance in a painting.

The ship has a prominent lion figurehead. Behind it, the vessel’s beakhead bulkhead (the upright wall within the ship’s hull, from which the ship’s foremost section protrudes) has six full-length figures on it, each spaced between doorways which lead onto the head. In the rail above the beakhead are two wreathed ports.

The ‘Windsor Castle’ may have been one of the 90-gun second rate ships built following the Defence Act of 1677.

It was probably executed with other ships lying in the Medway, either in 1684 at the time of the launch of the rebuilt ‘Royal Sovereign’ or in the following year, when van de Velde was also on the Medway.