File:French Fireships Attacking the English Fleet off Quebec, 28 June 1759 RMG BHC0394.tiff

An incident during the Seven Years War, 1756-63, between France and Britain. 1759 was a year of victories for Britain and on 26 June Admiral Sir Charles Saunders' powerful fleet, which had conveyed Major-General James Wolfe's land forces to Canada, anchored off the Ile d'Orleans on the St Lawrence River, below Quebec. A month after the fire-ship attack depicted in BHC0392, the French made a second bid to dislodge Saunders' fleet, which is the subject of this painting. About 100 fire-rafts were sent down but these fared no better than the earlier fire-ships and were towed safely aside by the boats of the fleet. On 13 September Wolfe's infantry were landed from boats below the Heights of Abraham and scaled them during the night to reach the plateau outside the city. There they defeated the French army of the Marquis de Montcalm in a set-piece battle of which both Wolfe and Montcalm were the leading casualties. On 18 September the city capitulated, marking the beginning of the end for the French colonies in North America. Within the year mainland Canada was completely in British hands.

This is a reduced copy of Samuel Scott's painting of the second fire-rafts attack on 28 July 1759 (BHC0393) but with slight differences. The fleet is seen from the north across the Ile d'Orleans, part of which forms the foreground of the right half of the painting. Beyond it are the boats of the fleet and the fire-rafts, the smoke of the latter blowing to the left, with Quebec in the extreme right background. The left foreground of the picture is taken up with the anchored British fleet in which Saunders' flagship, 'Stirling Castle', is in starboard-quarter view in the foreground just left of centre.

Serres' additions to Scott's version are principally a large boat under her stern and the moon in the sky on the left. Serres was a well-born Frenchman from Gascony who ran away to sea in merchant service rather than follow family wish that he enter the Church. He probably arrived in England as a naval prisoner of war, took up painting and settled there. His early paintings show the influence of Brooking and Monamy's interpretations of Dutch art but he rapidly achieved recognition for his more documentary visual accounts of sea actions of the Seven Years War, 1756-63, becoming established as England's leading marine painter. His work was even more in demand in the 1770s and 1780s, recording the naval history of the War of American Independence. In 1768 Serres was a founder member of the Royal Academy and at the end of his life its librarian. A well respected and sociable man, he was appointed Marine Painter to George III in 1780.