The cosmopolitan Dominic Serres (1719–93), originally from Auch in Gascony, is remarkable for becoming Britain’s leading marine painter and the only one to be a founding member of the Royal Academy in 1768. As a merchant sea captain, he had been captured by the British and brought as a prisoner to London, where he soon established himself as a painter of maritime subjects. His mastery of English, Latin and several foreign languages must have elevated him socially and later in his life he became the RA Librarian, as well as Marine Painter to HM the King. As a result Serres was, as Eleanor Hughes has rather elegantly put it (see Bibliography), ‘neatly poised between the realms of nautical expertise and gentlemanly engagement with art.’ He is best known for his large paintings of naval engagements in the Seven Years War and in the American War of Independence, and as most were commissioned by sea officers who had been involved, it is not surprising that one referred to the artist as ‘the famous Serres, the Van de Velde of his day.’ His pair of Barrington’s Action at St Lucia (December 1778), exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1780, approach the subject in a cool topographical manner, possibly under the influence of Serres’s neighbour and friend, the landscape painter and engraver Paul Sandby. These paintings are likely to be those of which it was noted, in one of the earliest comparisons with British marine painters rather than Willem Van de Velde the Younger, that ‘the events represented in them are rendered highly interesting: the shipping very highly finished and the sea expressed with that accuracy of colouring, which distinguishes the works of Brooking and Monamy.’ Serres courted the international market despite his status as a marine painter in England. In 1785, through his acquaintance with Vernet, he was poised to paint a series of large paintings of ‘France’s glorious deeds performed by the navy in this last war to decorate the walls of the naval training establishments at Brest, Rochefort, and Toulon’, a project which did not come to fruition. A number of his late watercolours depict naval shipping in the English Channel and may have been calculated to appeal to the nationalistic sentiments stirred up by the prospect of imminent war with Revolutionary France. Our panel here of 1772, perhaps anticipating this patriotic strain, is typical in palette and composition of his ‘home waters’ subjects and was probably not painted to order, as there is nothing specific to identify the principal vessel. Nonetheless the excellent state of preservation of the paint surface and the stability of the oak panel make this a highly desirable example of Dominic Serres’ smaller oil paintings. Serres died in November 1793, a few months before the outbreak of the French Wars, the events of which were greatly to occupy his successors, and a few months after his work for Sir John Jervis (see pp. 20–21) had been seen in the Royal Academy exhibition. The sale of his collection and studio contents took place at Christie’s in March and April 1794, with another sale in April 1795. The contents reveal Serres’s broad and extensive interest in European art and that of his British contemporaries, in addition to marine art such as his Van de Velde drawings. At the time of his death, he had begun work on Liber Nauticus with his son, John Thomas Serres (1759–1825), who was to become an established sea painter in his own right. Liber Nauticus was a compilation of engravings after their own drawings of ships and their equipment, studies of harbours and even the vagaries of the surface of the sea, and it was intended as an instruction manual for all aspiring marine artists. One of the plates, identifying all the sails on a frigate, is to be found as the frontispiece in every part.