John Cleveley the Younger never sailed with Captain Cook, yet he was among the first artists to profit from the huge public appetite for images of Cook's Pacific voyages, producing prints including the Death of Cook and views of HMS Resolution and HMS Discovery at Moorea purely from secondhand accounts and the sketches of others who had actually made the voyage. Born at Deptford on Christmas Day 1747, the twin brother of the marine painter Robert Cleveley and son of John Cleveley the Elder, a shipwright and painter at the Deptford Dockyard, John grew up immersed in the same naval world as his father, and, like his brother, received training in watercolour from Paul Sandby, then chief drawing master at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich.
Where his father's dockyard launch scenes maintained a certain documentary stiffness, John the Younger developed a more atmospheric, open manner, with low horizons recalling seventeenth-century Dutch marine painting, evident in works such as his view of the launch of HMS Alexander at Deptford in 1778. He exhibited at the Royal Academy and the Free Society of Artists, showing views of royal reviews at Spithead, naval subjects gathered on his own travels around Lisbon, the Tagus and Gibraltar, and coastal scenery closer to home at Portsmouth, Dover and the Isle of Wight. He died in London, probably at Deptford, in June 1786, at just thirty-eight.
The painting by Cleveley the Younger held by John Mitchell Fine Paintings, of vessels becalmed offshore, exemplifies the more atmospheric, painterly approach that distinguished his marine work from his father's more strictly documentary manner, and connects within the gallery's collection to his father, his twin brother Robert, and their shared teacher, Paul Sandby.