The battle of Trafalgar, and the victory of Lord Nelson over the combined French and Spanish Fleets, 21st October 1805: Admiral Villeneuve's flagship Bucentaure surrendering to H.M.S. Conqueror

Nelson's celebrated strategy to break the Franco-Spanish line-of-battle in two places when he brought the enemy to action was to win him the greatest victory in the long history of war at sea. It was not achieved without loss however and its most serious disadvantage was that his own flagship Victory and those vessels immediately astern of her were subjected to a withering fire for well over half-an-hour before they were able to reply. Suffering heavy casualties as a result, it was not until just after 12.30pm. that Victory finally cut the enemy line between Bucentaure (Villeneuve's flagship) and Rédoubtable, closely followed by H.M.S. Téméraire and H.M.S. Neptune, at which point the battle began in earnest. Victory let loose her port broadside into the unprotected stern of the French flagship Bucentaure, at the same moment as pouring a starboard volley into the side of Rédoubtable. Victory had approached Bucentaure's ornate but vulnerable stern so closely that the French ensign had literally hung over Victory's deck and, as Captain Hardy coaxed Victory away from a near-collision, he had given the order to open fire. Victory's port carronade, one of the largest guns in the fleet, loaded with a single 68-pound ball and a keg of 500 musket-balls, fired first and was immediately followed by the entire fifty guns of the port broadside in a rapid ripple. The impact caused Bucentaure to heel in the water from the shock whilst the devastation wrought by scores of cannon-shot and hundreds of musket-balls hurtling down the entire length of her decks summarily killed 365 men and wounded a further 219; twenty of her eighty guns were dismounted and, in an instant, the French flagship was rendered almost impotent and effectively unable to continue fighting, and helpless to do anything other than surrender.

Virtually instantaneously, Victory crashed into Rédoubtable's port bow and, pushing her head around, brought the two ships side by side and practically touching as Hardy ordered the starboard carronade to fire. This signalled the start of the much longer duel, during which Nelson would be shot and fatally wounded from one of Rédoubtable's sharpshooters, and which only ended once the Frenchman was simultaneously engaged by Téméraire and could no longer stand an assault from both sides.

The present work shows the surrender of the French flagship, Bucentaure, to Captain James Atcherley , Royal Marines, from H.M.S. Conqueror, commanded by Captain (later Admiral Sir) Israel Pellew, who immediately went on to engage and take the huge Spanish four-decker Santisima Trinidad.

As a leading painter of the Romantic movement, de Loutherbourg influenced a number of artists including J.M.W. Turner and was an extremely important painter in his own time. Born in Strasbourg, he moved to London in 1771, having been Court Painter to Louis XV of France. Most of his output were landscapes but he also painted a small number of heroic naval battle scenes that directly influenced maritime painting in Britain.