Thomas Mitchell was both a painter and shipwright to the Admiralty. He was a Builders' Assistant at His Majesty's Dockyard, first at Chatham, in 1771, and then Deptford, where he was based from 1774 and was later appointed Assistant Surveyor of the Navy. Like John Cleveley the Elder (c.1712-1777), whom he must have known well, he exhibited large battle pieces at the Free Society of Artists from 1763-80 and the Royal Academy from 1774-1789. Paintings by Mitchell are in the collection of the National Maritime Museum and the British Museum also holds a large collection of his watercolours and drawings which depict the main dockyards and harbours of southern England.

The American Revolutionary War and its connected conflicts ended in 1783 and in 1785, the year of this painting, Britain was in a period of relative peace. Together with Portsmouth in the Solent, Plymouth became one of the two preeminent naval dockyards of Britain's period of global naval supremacy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today it remains the largest naval base in Western Europe.