This portrait depicts the London merchant Robert Curling (1741-1809). It is a standard 30 x 25-inch head-and-shoulders portrait. The sitter is an elderly man in a black coat of style about 1800, turned to viewer's left but facing front, seated in a red-backed chair and holding a paper in his visible left hand with title 'Navigation Act'.

Robert Curling was born in 1741 in Ramsgate, Kent, son of Captain John Curling by his wife Catherine Somner. He is generally acknowledged to be the founder of the London Shipowners' and River Users' Society and chaired meetings of the committee of London shipowners in 1803 and of the Society of Shipowners of Great Britain (founded 1802) in 1804. He may have been one of the partners in Cox and Curling's shipyard at Limehouse, which was formally founded in 1811.

The portrait was acquired as a gift with minute books of the London Shipowners' and River Users' Society and shows minor damage from the Baltic Exchange bombing, which was an attack by the Provisional IRA on the City of London on 10 April 1992.