The Battle of Camperdown

The Battle of Camperdown is a 1799 history painting by the Anglo-American artist John Singleton Copley. It depicts the conclusion to the naval Battle of Camperdown on 11 October 1797 fought in the North Sea between the British Royal Navy and the French-Allied Dutch during the French Revolutionary Wars. A decisive victory for the British fleet, Copley's picture shows the British Admiral Adam Duncan accepting the surrender of the Dutch commander Jan Willem de Winter. Its fuller title is The Surrender of the Dutch Admiral de Winter to Admiral Duncan at the Battle of Camperdown.

Duncan was hailed as a national hero after Camperdown, and Copley produced the work without being commissioned. Although he hoped to interest Alderman John Boydell of the City of London in the work, his relationship with him had been damaged by disputes over his epic 1791 painting of the Siege of Gibraltar and no agreement was reached. While working on the larger painting, he also produced a portrait of Admiral Duncan which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1798.

Copley exhibited the completed painting of the battle and exhibited it in Albemarle Street in London, around eighteen months after Camperdown. While it received respectful reviews and was viewed by George III and Queen Charlotte, it failed to enjoy the same public success as his earlier paintings. This may partly be to his choosing to prioritise depicting Duncan and Camperdown over Admiral Horatio Nelson whose victory at the Battle of the Nile rapidly led him to eclipse the popularity of Duncan.

The painting is now in the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh. A similar depiction of the scene by Daniel Orme, exhibited two years before Copley's painting, is now in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.