'Portrait of Admiral Peter Rainier'. This is apparently a copy, probably based on the 1824 print by Charles Turner after an original by Thomas Hickey, showing Rainier as a vice-admiral in the 1795-1812 full-dress uniform, wearing spectacles. Hickey's original would have been painted in Madras between 1799 and 1804. In 1805 Vice-Admiral Benjamin William Page (1765-1845) - an old shipmate of Rainier's - had Arthur William Devis paint a small portrait of him shortly after his return to England from India, which broadly copies Hickey's pose but with different buttoning of the waistcoat and a cameo-headed pin in the cravat: Devis also showed him slightly older in his version. Rainier would then still have had Hickey's portrait for Devis to copy, with these slight variations from life (which are not shown here). It is also known that Page gave another oil portrait of Rainier (artist unidentified) to the Royal United Service Museum (est. 1830/31), which is provisionally assumed to be this one: it is recorded as a gift from Page but cannot have been directly to the National Maritime Museum given that he died long before its creation. On the dissolution of the RUSM in 1963, many items were transferred to the NMM, though the exact record remains to be checked in this instance. [PvdM 12/21]