Along with many other young artists, Salmon believed that his artistic future lay in the United States. Before his departure in 1828, the artist executed his only extant portrait, "Portrait of the Corsair, John Paul Jones", a work very much a part of the Romantic ethos of his time. He assumed his "likeness" of Paul Jones would form a bond with the viewers in his future home. He could not know, having never been to America, that the memory of America's greatest naval hero had effectively vanished in the public mind before the painting was completed.