Il capitano Philemon Pownall

On the last day of May 1762, off Cadiz, the sloop Favourite under Philemon Pownall and the frigate Active stopped a Spanish ship called the Hermione on her way home from Peru. Her cargo was worth over half a million pounds, the richest capture of the Seven Years' War, and the two commanders took close to 65,000 pounds each. Seven years later Pownall was sitting to Joshua Reynolds, who charged more than anyone in London for work of this kind. The sittings ran from December 1768 to April 1769, the months in which Reynolds was knighted as the first president of the new Royal Academy. Pownall stands nearly life-size against a heavy sky, one arm resting on an anchor. He was killed by a cannonball off Ostend in June 1780, still in command.