This large oil painting of the crew on board the galleon Revenge was painted by Francis Wright Bourdillon.

Revenge was a state-of-the-art galleon built in 1577 in which Sir Francis Drake led the English Fleet against the Spanish Armada in 1588. However, this painting depicts the well-documented events leading to the demise of Revenge. The ship met its end in 1591, when, under the control of Sir Richard Grenville (an explorer, coloniser and merchant fleet-owner from near Bideford in Devon) it experienced an unfortunate encounter with fifty three Spanish warships near the Azores.

A three-day battle ensued during which the Spanish were apparently thwarted several times in their attempts board the ship. Revenge reputedly sunk or damaged many of the Spanish ships. Eventually though, it could not stand up to the Spanish attack and many of the crew were sick, dead or injured. It is said that Sir Richard Grenville ordered the crew to sink the Revenge rather than surrender. But surrender they did. The Spanish agreed that the crew would not be harmed. However, Grenville had been mortally wounded in the battle and died several days later. The Revenge, with both Spanish crew and English captives on board was subsequently wrecked in a storm off the Azores.

The scene in this painting perhaps depicts Sir Richard Grenville talking to his ailing crew.

The painter of this picture, the son of a British civil servant in India, Francis, known as ‘Frank’ Wright Bourdillon, was born in Madras in 1851. He later moved to England and attended the Slade School of Art in London. He moved to Cornwall in 1887. He became a member or the Newlyn School of artists, which was a colony of artists who lived and worked in or near Newlyn near Penzance, Cornwall, from the 1880s until the early 20th century.

The subject material of Bourdillon’s paintings varied from depiction of the historic, an example being this painting, in which he was clearly influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, to landscapes and seascapes, more indicative of the Newlyn School.

In 1892, he left Cornwall after which his life took a different turn; he decided to return to India and became a missionary. He eventually returned to England and died in Gloucestershire in 1924.

The exact date of this painting is unknown but records show that it was exhibited at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, a world fair celebrating the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the New World in 1492.

Interestingly a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson about Revenge dates to 1878, which suggests the subject matter, harking back to the 'romance' of Elizabethan times, was popular in the late 19th century.