File:Captain George Duff (1764-1805) RMG RP6242.jpg
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Summary
anonymous: Captain George Duff (1764-1805) | ||||||||||||
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Artist | ||||||||||||
Author |
after Sir Henry Raeburn |
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Title | ||||||||||||
Object type |
painting object_type QS:P31,Q3305213 |
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Genre | portrait | |||||||||||
Description |
English: Captain George Duff (1764-1805) A half-length portrait, slightly to the right, showing Duff in his captain's full dress uniform (over three years) of the 1795-1812 pattern. A kit-cat style portrait; a copy of the original, which was painted about 1800.
The son of a solicitor, George Duff first went to sea as a stowaway on a merchant vessel. Aged 13, he joined his uncle, Captain Robert Duff, in the Mediterranean and, through his uncle’s interest, became a lieutenant at 16. He saw action in the ‘Montagu’, 74 guns, at the Battle of the Saints in 1782. He was promoted commander in 1790 and post captain in 1793. A series of commands followed, culminating in the ‘Mars’, 74 guns, which he took into action at Trafalgar as part of Collingwood's lee division.
Duff entrusted a final letter addressed to his wife, Sophia, to his son, Norwich, who was serving as a first-class volunteer in the ‘Mars’: ‘Dearest Sophia, I have just time to tell you we are going into Action with the Combined Fleet. I hope and trust in God that we shall all behave as becomes us, and that I may yet have the happiness of taking my beloved wife and children in my arms. Norwich is quite well and happy. I have, however, ordered him off the quarter-deck. Yours ever, and most truly, George.’
Despite the hopes of his letter, Duff’s battle was brutally short. As the ‘Mars’ engaged the ‘Fougueux’ and ‘Pluton’, a cannonball from the former raked across the quarterdeck and struck Duff in the neck, severing his head completely. Midshipman James Robinson later told his father that, upon realizing the event, the crew ‘held his body up and gave three cheers to show they were not discouraged by it’. Duff’s headless body was covered in a Union flag and the crew returned to the guns. He was buried at sea after a service conducted in the pouring rain by Lieutenant William Hennah, attended by Norwich Duff, who had survived the battle, and the defeated French commander Pierre Villeneuve. Norwich continued in naval service, reaching the rank of vice-admiral in 1857. His own letter to his widowed mother opens 'Dearest Mamma, You cannot possibly imagine how unwilling I am to begin this melancholy letter...' The horror of Duff's death and magnitude of his loss to his family is captured in the letter Hennah wrote to Sophia Duff on 27 October 1805: 'I believe that a more unpleasant task, than that which is now imposed upon me, can scarely fall to the lot of a person ... as being myself the husband of a beloved partner, and the father of children...' There is a monument to Duff in St Paul's Cathedral. |
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Depicted people | George Duff | |||||||||||
Date |
1764 date QS:P571,+1764-00-00T00:00:00Z/9 |
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Dimensions | Frame: 1108 mm x 908 mm x 120 mm | |||||||||||
Collection |
institution QS:P195,Q7374509 |
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Current location | ||||||||||||
Accession number |
BHC2666 |
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References | ||||||||||||
Source/Photographer | http://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/14140 | |||||||||||
Permission (Reusing this file) |
The original artefact or artwork has been assessed as public domain by age, and faithful reproductions of the two dimensional work are also public domain. No permission is required for reuse for any purpose. The text of this image record has been derived from the Royal Museums Greenwich catalogue and image metadata. Individual data and facts such as date, author and title are not copyrightable, but reuse of longer descriptive text from the catalogue may not be considered fair use. Reuse of the text must be attributed to the "National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London" and a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA-3.0 license may apply if not rewritten. Refer to Royal Museums Greenwich copyright. |
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Identifier InfoField | Greenwich Hospital Collection number: GH28 Loan File Number: Y2000.023 file number: 4G10.031 id number: BHC2666 |
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Collection InfoField | Oil paintings |
Licensing
This is a faithful photographic reproduction of a two-dimensional, public domain work of art. The work of art itself is in the public domain for the following reason:
The official position taken by the Wikimedia Foundation is that "faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are public domain".
This photographic reproduction is therefore also considered to be in the public domain in the United States. In other jurisdictions, re-use of this content may be restricted; see Reuse of PD-Art photographs for details. |
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File history
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Date/Time | Thumbnail | Dimensions | User | Comment | |
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current | 11:21, 8 October 2017 | 960 × 1,280 (539 KB) | Fæ | Royal Museums Greenwich Oil paintings (1764), http://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/14140 #3730 |
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