For all his skill as a painter, John Cleveley the Elder never gave up his day job: even at the end of his life he was formally recorded as "carpenter, belonging to His Majesty's Ship Victory, in the pay of His Majesty's Navy," a shipwright's title he held to his death despite decades spent painting some of the finest dockyard scenes of the eighteenth century. Born in Southwark around 1712 or 1713 to a joiner's family, he was apprenticed in his teens to the joiner Thomas Miller and then to the Deptford shipwright John Hall, becoming a freeman of the Shipwrights' Company in 1743 and working at the Deptford Dockyard for the rest of his career.
From around 1745, alongside his trade, Cleveley began painting ship portraits, dockyard scenes and naval reviews, drawing directly on his professional knowledge of shipbuilding to achieve an accuracy in his depictions of vessels and dockyard architecture that few purely artistic contemporaries could match. His major dockyard launch scenes, sometimes composed with an eye to the grand naval spectacle of the occasion and occasionally influenced by Willem van de Velde the Younger's earlier compositions, combine documentary precision with a genuine sense of theatre, and his views of the Sheerness, Chatham and Plymouth dockyards were engraved by Thomas Milton for a well-known series of marine prints. He exhibited at the Free Society of Artists from 1764 and, later, the Royal Academy. With his wife Sarah he had seven children, and remarkably, three sons carried the family's maritime world forward in different directions: James went to sea as a ship's carpenter aboard Captain Cook's Resolution on the third and final Pacific voyage, while the twins John the Younger and Robert both became successful marine painters in their own right, trained partly by Paul Sandby, also represented in John Mitchell Fine Paintings' collection.
The painting by Cleveley the Elder held by John Mitchell Fine Paintings connects directly, within the gallery's holdings, to his sons John Cleveley the Younger and Robert Cleveley, and to Paul Sandby, their shared teacher, tracing a genuine three-generation engagement with the Royal Navy's dockyards that spans the whole of the eighteenth century.