During the long hot summer of 2022 I took part in and ultimately won Sky Arts Landscape Artist of the Year. As the winner I was commissioned by the Royal Maritime Museum at Greenwich to create a painting ‘inspired by the life and work of the Dutch Golden Age maritime artists the Van de Veldes’ to accompany a major survey exhibition of their work at Queens House. While filming the ‘winners film’ I was briefed on the commission by the head curator on the private balcony of Queens House and quickly took a few reference photos. The viewer of the painting is thus placed in this privileged position surveying both the locus of dominion and the instruments with which it is measured and thus ruled. It is rare that I include figures in my landscapes since my aim is to envelope the viewer in a scene such that it as if being in a scene rather than looking at a place, however in this instance the small figure facing us seems to have seen, address and perhaps challenge us quite directly. In my minds eye I imagine the figure to be perhaps the ghost of Adolph Verloc; the protagonist of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent