John Thomas Serres's later career was overshadowed, and ultimately ruined, by his wife's extraordinary public claim to be the illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Cumberland, styling herself "Princess Olive of Cumberland" and pursuing a decades-long campaign for royal recognition that made the family's name a byword for scandal in Regency London. Born in London in December 1759, the eldest son of Dominic Serres, a founder member of the Royal Academy and marine painter to George III, he trained under his father, working as a drawing-master at the maritime school in Chelsea before exhibiting his first works at the Royal Academy in 1780.
Serres travelled through France and Italy in 1789 and 1790, present in Paris at the fall of the Bastille and later signing himself "Giovanni T. Serres" for a period after his Italian sojourn, before succeeding his father as Marine Painter to George III in 1793 and being appointed Marine Draughtsman to the Admiralty in 1800, a role that took him drawing the coastlines of Britain, France, Spain and the Mediterranean. He published Liber Nauticus in 1805, a manual on marine drawing combining his own plates with his late father's, and was drawn to depicting dramatic weather and Thames-side subjects with real sensitivity. His marriage in 1791 to his former pupil Olivia Wilmot proved catastrophic: the couple separated in 1802 amid mutual recrimination, and following their 1804 divorce Serres was imprisoned for six years after abducting one of his daughters in a custody dispute. Olivia's escalating claims to royal parentage from 1817 onward destroyed what remained of Serres's court favour and professional standing, and his attempt to recoup his fortunes by establishing the Royal Coburg Theatre in 1818, a venture that would eventually become London's Old Vic, could not save him from a final descent into debt; he died in a London debtors' prison in December 1825.
The painting by Serres held by John Mitchell Fine Paintings connects, within the gallery's collection, to his father Dominic Serres, whose own reputation and royal appointment John Thomas inherited before his personal life unravelled so dramatically, offering a poignant contrast between a highly capable marine painter's professional talent and the misfortune that ultimately engulfed his career.