The pre-Dreadnought battleships 'Kashima' and 'Katori' (the class name) were sisters, their design being an improvement of the British King Edward VII class. Built by Armstrong-Whitworth at Elswick on the RIver Tyne they were the last warships constructed for the Imperial Japanese navy in British yards. Of 16,700 tons and just over 144 metres in length, their main armament was 2 x twin 12-inch guns and four single 10-inch, and they were launched in 1905 and completed in 1906. There were minor differences of detail in the two ships' fittings, but in this drawing Wyllie appears to have produced what is in effect a composite, though probably intending it to be 'Kashima'. PAE3361 is a similar vertical format drawing of 'Kashima' from astern, showing her in 1906 before leaving for Japan, which suggests this may have been done at the same time. However Wyllie also painted both ships when they arrived at Portsmouth on 9 May 1921, having sailed from Yokohama on 3 March bringing Crown Prince Hirohito, the first mJapanese crown prince to travel abroad, on an official visit to Europe that lasted several months. The prince travelled in 'Katori'. Wyllie painted a pair of oils of the two ships during their visit to Portsmouth, commissioned or at least bought by Kojiro Matsukata (1865-1950), son of Prince Masayoshi Matsukata (Prime Mininister of Japan for two terms in the 1890s). Kojiro was president of Kawasaki Shipbuilding and dockyards from 1896 to 1923 and visited London in 1916-18 and Paris in 1921-22. He was a major collector of Western art with the intention of founding a national gallery of it in Japan, a project only achieved after his death as the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo (est. 1959). The two Wyllies are not in that collection but that of the Museum of Imperial Collections, Tokyo. One was presented to the Imperial family by Kojiro's father, the other later purchased to reunite the pair when sold at auction. The two ships were scrapped in the mid 1920s under the terms of the Washington Treaty.