HUGGINS, William John

English painter of whose parents nothing is known. After several years at sea in the service of the East India Company, he settled in London. His house at 36 Leadenhall Street was near East India House, and he was regularly employed to paint carefully detailed pictures of the company’s ships. He exhibited 16 marine paintings at the Royal Academy between 1817 and 1844 and also showed at the British Institution and Suffolk Street.

He was appointed Marine Painter to William IV in 1834, his royal commissions include three paintings of the Battle of Trafalgar, which now hang at Hampton Court. His daughter married Edward Duncan (1803-82), a talented watercolourist and engraver who engraved many of Huggins’s paintings and sometimes acted as his assistant. The National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, has 26 of his works, mostly ship portraits of East Indiamen.