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The capture of Puerto Bello, the Spanish trading post on the coast of present-day Panama, was the most celebrated British naval victory of the first half of the eighteenth century. Admiral Edward Vernon, a fierce critic of Prime Minister Robert Walpole and what he saw as insufficiently assertive policies with regard to national trade and the maintenance of the navy, had boasted to Parliament in 1729 that he could take Porto Bello, as it was then known, with “six ships only.” Mounting hostilities between Britain and Spain in the 1730s broke out into war, and, in 1739, Vernon made good on his promise. News of the capture reached London in March 1740, and Monamy’s painting appears to have been installed at Vauxhall in a matter of weeks: Frederick, Prince of Wales (son of George II), and his wife, Augusta, viewed it there on May 19. Monamy’s composition provides a legible depiction of the action as it was described in published reports. The painting was one of a range of cultural productions that celebrated Vernon as a national hero.

Gallery label for Spreading Canvas - Eighteenth-Century British Marine Painting (Yale Center for British Art, 2016-09-09 - 2016-12-04)