Head-and-shoulders plaster bust of Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson on a round socle. He is shown in a cocked hat which bears the diamond chelengk presented to him after the Battle of the Nile by the Sultan of Turkey, and with his head turned slightly to his right.

He wears rear-admiral's full-dress uniform with the ribands of the Bath and St Ferdinand, the orders of the Bath, St Ferdinand and the Crescent, and two Naval gold medals on ribbons round his neck.

This bust is presumably one of an edition and relates to the colossal statue which Baily (1788-1867) carved between 1839 and 1843 to go on top of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square, London. Railton's column was erected in the former year and the statue placed on top in November of the latter. Baily's sculptural portrait (here and on the Column) is, like Abbott's, unusual among artistically significant examples from Nelson's later life, and the two or three decades after his death, in showing him in a hat.

The currency of the image by the centenary of Trafalgar in 1905 is well demonstrated, however, by Albert Holden's painting of 1904 and the 1905 print from it, entitled 'Saluting the Admiral' (PAH7615). This shows one of these Baily busts, set up in the Painted Hall at Greenwich, being saluted by a Greenwich Pensioner. The Pensioner corps had ceased to exist with the Hospital's closure in 1869 but there is photographic evidence that the Naval Gallery in the Painted Hall did have one of these placeter busts, until perhaps as late as the 1920s. Its fate is not known, since it was not among the Gallery items transferred to the care of the NMM in the 1930s. This one was purchased for the Museum at a London sale in January 1934.