This sheet comes from a group of drawings attributed to the painter and etcher Abraham Casembrot. He was born in Flanders, but moved to Messina, possibly for religious reasons. He was active there between 1650 and 1675. He produced about twenty etchings, mainly of Mediterranean ports and vessels. The drawings in the Museum's collection appear on both sides of the sheet of paper and depict Mediterranean craft. This work has on its reverse a drawing of a Mediterranean town, perhaps Messina, which appears to have been drawn from life and, like others in the series, has a prominent collector's mark in the form of a letter 'P'. This suggests that they may have belonged to the early 19th-century Roman collector M Pacetti.