A posthumous three-quarter length portrait. Samuel Plimsoll is shown seated to left in a black coat and buff trousers. His right hand rests on a paper on which is drawn a Plimsoll Mark and on the wall behind is a picture of a sinking merchant ship. The portrait is known to be posthumous, and was either made from another portrait or more likely from a photograph. As a radical Member of Parliament Plimsoll’s fierce lobbying was largely responsible for the passing of the Merchant Shipping Act of 1876 which did so much for the safety and welfare of merchant seamen.

Campbell, the painter, was born on 2 December 1877, and trained there at the Royal Scottish Academy School. He won a number of early artistic prizes and exhibited widely in Britain, including at the Royal Academy in London, where he mainly lived and practised. His date of death is as yet not certain, but he may have been the Reginald H. Campbell who died in Chelsea in the January-March quarter of 1962, though if so his age was then wrongly recorded as 87 rather than 84.