English: George Knapton (London 1698 - 1778)

Portrait of Admiral of the Fleet Edward Hawke, 1st Baron Hawke (1705-1781), half-length, wearing the ribbon of the Order of Bath

signed lower left: Knapton / pxt

oil on canvas: 76 x 63.5 cm.; 30 x 25 in.

The sitter was the only son of Edward Hawke (d. 1718), barrister of Lincoln's Inn, and Elizabeth, daughter of Nathaniel Bladen of Hemsworth in Yorkshire. It was on his uncle, Colonel Bladen, who was a commissioner of trade and plantations from 1717 to 1746, that Hawke depended for his early naval patronage. On his father's death in 1718 Hawke became his uncle's ward. He joined the navy on 10 February 1720. Hawke is best known for his defeat of the French fleet in Quiberon Bay in November 1759 - an extremely hazardous action fought close in on a rocky coast, in the fading light of a November evening. This crowned an already distinguished active career in which he had been knighted in 1747, as a very junior rear-admiral, for his victory over the French at the Second Battle of Cape Finisterre. He was later First Lord of the Admiralty, 1766-71 and became Admiral of the Fleet in 1768, but was five years into retirement before George III (who disapproved of his political views) eventually made him 1st Baron Hawke.

On 3 October 1737 Hawke, aged thirty-two, married seventeen-year-old Catharine Brooke (1719/20–1756). The marriage proved a happy one and Hawke was an affectionate father to their three sons and one daughter; three other children died in infancy.