Edward Vernon

The sitter here is Admiral Edward Vernon, and half the Royal Navy owed him their daily drink. In 1740 Vernon ordered that his sailors' rum be watered down to keep them sober, and because he wore a coat of coarse grogram cloth the men called him Old Grog. The watered rum took the name too, and grog it has been ever since. Gainsborough painted him around 1753, still a young artist in his twenties working out of Suffolk, years before London and society portraits made his name. Behind the admiral stands a fortress by the sea, a nod to Porto Bello in Panama, the Spanish harbour he had stormed and taken in 1739.