A view from the East Greenwich waterfront looking towards the Hospital, apparently on a warm summer evening. Two ceremonial - probably royal - barges are at the Hospital water stair with a huge assemblage of people in the Grand Square, both suggesting that the picture records the end of a royal visit to the Hospital, probably by the 'Sailor King' King William IV (reg. 1830-37) who was a popular and fairly frequent visitor during the Governorships of his old friend Sir Richard Keats and (from 1834) Keats's successor Sir Thomas Masterman Hardy. It may be the King and Queen Adelaide's departure on the evening of 1 August 1835, when they made a day visit to mark the anniversary of the Battle of the Nile in 1798. If so PAH3254 - which is an oil on canvas sketch by Holland, though now mounted as a print, may show their morning arrival.

Most of Holland's on-the-spot work at Greenwich was done in the 1830s, but he later returned to it, either as favourite subject or because commissioned to. BHC1822, dated 1850, is a major example exhibited in Paris in 1855, and in 1867 (when the Hospital had largely closed) he exhibited another view of it as it was in 1837. This small painting, whose tone is one of elegiac reminiscence of a fading era, is signed with initials lower left centre, 'JH 1854'.