Patriotic appeal … A Flagship, Wearing the Flag of a Vice Admiral of the Red, Before the Wind off the English Coast, With a Cutter, a Ketch-rigged Sloop and Other Shipping, 1754, by Charles Brooking (H177.8cm x W312.4cm). Photograph: Foundling Museum
This dramatic painting by Charles Brooking hangs in the Picture Gallery of the Foundling Museum. Taylor White, treasurer of the Foundling Hospital at the time, commissioned the seascape in 1754. According to John Brownlow’s Memoranda or Chronicles of the Foundling Hospital, White had seen one of Brooking’s pictures in a shop.
Brooking painted this enormous picture – over three metres wide – in just 18 days, working in a room in the Foundling Hospital itself because his own garret studio was too small. The painting, Brooking’s largest, was intended to be a companion piece to Peter Monamy’s seascape An English Fleet in the Downs, which has been missing since the beginning