Lemuel Francis Abbott

Private collection, Utah;

From whom acquired by the present owner.

This portrait belongs to the extensive series of likenesses that Lemuel Francis Abbott painted of Admiral Horatio, First Viscount Nelson, the earliest of which dates to 1797. Abbott depicts the admiral at a pivotal moment in his career, shortly after he had been granted the Star of the Order of the Bath and awarded the Naval Gold Medal for his victory at the Battle of Saint Vincent. His empty right sleeve, neatly pinned to his uniform, serves as a stark reminder of the musket-ball wound he sustained during the assault on Santa Cruz, Tenerife, on 25 July 1797, an injury that required the amputation of his arm. 

Nelson sat to Abbott twice. The first session took place in late 1797 while he was recuperating at Greenwich Hospital under the care of his friend, Captain William Locker, the institution’s governor. During this difficult recovery, the amputated stump became infected, causing ‘scarcely any intermission of pain, day or night, for three months after his return to England.'¹ Abbott’s portrait, later presented by Nelson to Locker, reflects this ordeal in its depiction of a tense and visibly drawn sitter. 

In the years that followed, Abbott returned repeatedly to Nelson’s image, producing numerous replicas and variants as the admiral’s fame grew. As Abbott warmed to his theme, so too Nelson appeared visibly more healthy, virile and heroic. The present work belongs to this later phase. The raw vulnerability recorded in 1797 is no longer visible, and although the pinned sleeve remains as evidence of Nelson’s suffering, Abbott presents a calm and serene figure, wholly in keeping with the contemporary appetite for heroic representation.

A variant of this portrait, originally painted for Nelson’s wife, is in the National Portrait Gallery, London.²

¹ R. Southey, The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson, London 1813, p.115.

² Inv. no. 394; oil on canvas, 74.9 x 62.2 cm.; https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw04633/Horatio-Nelson