Inscribed 'No 15 Idler' [? possibly 'Illus']' this study was reproduced as no. 15 (p.40) in Wyllie's small instructional book 'Marine Painting in Water Colour' (1901), with the title given here. He does not name the ship in the book and uses the sketch primarily as an example for representing a crowd of figures. It is is the type of watercolour study he and other artists called a 'blot made as a memorandum, but it records all the circumstances. You will observe that as the crowd thins out you get individual figures, which must be carefully touched in in right proportion; ... Vermilion is used in the brighter reds.' The ship appears to be the 'Majestic'-class pre-Dreadnought battleship 'Illustrious', since it was indeed floated out of the No. 6 dock at Chatham on 17 September 1896. The black rectangle at lower right is probably the floating caisson for closing off the dry-dock in which the ship was built and then launched from, of which that in the adjoining pumped-out dock is also visible. Wyllie has omitted the tugs which would have pulled the ship out of the dock in this form of launching.