Captain Alexander Hood, 1726-1814

Reynolds painted this in 1763, the year the Seven Years' War finally ended, and the sitter was one of the navy that had just won it. Alexander Hood, then a captain, leans against a rock with his hand resting on his sword, in the plain undress uniform officers wore at sea rather than for ceremony. The ship in the distance is not decoration. It records a real action from 1761, when Hood took the Warwick, a French vessel that had itself once been British before the French seized it years earlier. He had already been at Quiberon Bay in 1759, the storm-swept battle that wrecked France's plan to invade Britain. Hood lived on to 1814 and was made Viscount Bridport, and in 1825 his widow gave this portrait to the naval hospital at Greenwich.