The battle of Camperdown, 11 October 1797

This painting of the Battle of Camperdown at the Royal Museums Greenwich, painted in 1801, depicts the 1797 naval engagement where Admiral Adam Duncan's British fleet decisively defeated the Dutch Batavian Republic's navy off the coast of North Holland — one of the most important British naval victories of the Revolutionary Wars. De Loutherbourg, who had become the leading battle and marine painter in Britain, produced this monumental canvas as a patriotic commission celebrating British naval supremacy during the most dangerous years of the Napoleonic era. His Eidophusikon — a miniature mechanical theatre of moving painted scenes with elaborate sound and lighting effects, which he had developed in the 1780s — was enormously influential in developing the panorama and diorama entertainments that would define popular visual culture in the nineteenth century, and his theatrical sensibility is fully evident in this dramatically staged naval epic.

The vast naval engagement is depicted with dramatic atmospheric effects—cannon smoke, stormy skies, and churning seas. De Loutherbourg's theatrical background (he designed stage sets for David Garrick) is evident in the dramatic lighting.