(Updated, January 2011). Oval miniature in watercolour on ivory, in a gilt metal oval mount set into a rectangular black wooden backing board, with a suspension ring. A semi-legible inscription on the reverse is in fact: 'Dr Harness, Upper Berkeley Street, Portman Square' - his address when elected to the Linnaean Society in February 1809, but from which he resigned in a letter from St Albans in February 1818 (Linn. Soc.).

He is shown head and part shoulders, looking to his right, wearing a blue coat with brass buttons and white waistcoat, shirt and neck cloth. His grey hair is worn straight and long over his ears, possibly with a queue behind, and his eyes appear to be grey or hazel. The likeness is well done, though a little rough, perhaps partly from paint deterioration. The background is a neutral one of grey/ pink vertical brush strokes, with dashes of turquoise that may be an oxidation effect.

Harness was a naval physician and surgeon, born in London on 15 November 1754. He initially trained with his doctor grandfather, John Foote Harness, then under Dr Saunders at St George's Hospital and the surgeon, Mr Else, at St Thomas's. He was a young friend of Lord Spencer who suggested he enter naval or army service and in December 1776 was appointed assistant surgeon of the 'Sylph', under Captain Richard Dacres, bound for Antigua. Here he transferred to the station flagship 'Portland' and was then appointed assistant surgeon ashore in the naval hospital. In 1778 he was promoted to surgeon by local order. What followed to 1793 is not yet known, but by then he was a surgeon at the Royal Naval Hospital, Haslar, and raising a growing family at Wickham, Hants.

In that year he went to the Mediterranean as physician to Admiral Lord Hood's Toulon expedition, during which he pioneered the use of 'citrid acid' (lemon juice) against scurvy. From 1816, when Sir Gilbert Blane’s pamphlet ‘On the Health of Seamen’ ignored this and took credit for its wider introduction, Harness spent his remaining years in a correspondence campaign to reassert his contribution. From 1796 to 1798-99 he was Physician to the Mediterranean Fleet, based at the British naval hospital at Almada, Lisbon, where his family joined him, and then - after clashing with Earl St Vincent as C-in-C - briefly superintendent of the military hospitals at Gibraltar. He returned to England by 1800 when Earl Spencer, as First Lord of the Admiralty, appointed him a Commissioner of the Sick and Wounded Board to replace Blane (who had resigned). He became its chairman in 1802 and in 1804 successfully addressed Lord Melville, by then First Lord, on improvement of naval surgeons' pay. From 1806, when it took over the 'Sick and Hurt' Board's functions, he became the sole medical Commissioner on the Transport Board, to 1817.

Harness had five children by his first wife, Sarah (née Dredge, b. 1765): John; William (1790-1869) a well known literary scholar; Richard Stephens (1792-after 1849), a Commander RN; Mary, reportedly Nelson’s god-daughter; and Henry Drury, later General Sir H. D. Harness RE (1804-83). Widowed during Henry’s childhood, Harness remarried in spring 1814 to the widow of a Mediterranean colleague, Admiral Robert Linzee (d. 1804; see ‘Naval Chronicle', April 1814, p. 352). After this he lived in St Albans until after July 1818, then may have moved to nearby Abbot's Langley where his wife died in 1826 (see 'The Times', 23 Sept.). Though previously thought to have died later in 1818, he only did so on 3 January 1823 'after a long and severe illness', at Brighton, where he was buried ('Morning Post, 6 Jan.).

A 'Naval Chronicle' memoir of 1816 ( vol.35, pp. 265-7), includes an engraved portrait of about that date (see PAG6773). The Bodleian Library holds family papers which were the basis of two books by Caroline Duncan-Jones: one (1955) on his literary son, William; the other (1957) on his own younger brother, also William, a soldier (?1762-1804).