Thomas Mitchell

Thomas Mitchell was a naval officer who became an official of the Navy Board and painted sea battles from the professional knowledge of a man who had sailed in them. He is not the Australian surveyor-explorer of the same name, nor the twentieth-century actor, and the three are regularly confused. He served at sea and then in the shipbuilding administration, rising to Assistant Surveyor of the Navy, a post concerned with the design and construction of warships. That background is what distinguishes his painting from the marine art of people who worked from description: rigging, hull form and the relative positions of ships in a line of battle are correct in his canvases, which is why they have been used as evidence about the actions they show. His large oil of the Battle of the Saintes, fought in April 1782 between Rodney and de Grasse in the Caribbean, records the moment the British line broke through the French, a manoeuvre that ended the French threat to Jamaica and helped set the terms on which the American war was concluded the following year. He exhibited at the Royal Academy and at the Society of Artists, and he was an amateur in the period's sense: a man of another profession who painted seriously. His works are in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. The Saintes itself deserves the accuracy. Rodney's ships broke the French line in three places rather than engaging it end to end, which was close to heretical under the fighting instructions of the day, and it produced the most decisive British fleet action between the Seven Years' War and the Nile. De Grasse was captured with his flagship. Mitchell's canvas is one of the few contemporary images made by somebody who understood what he was looking at.

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