(Updated, February 2018). The process shown taking place in this workshop appears to be making up canister-shot for artillery, with packages of shot being packed into standard-weight sheet metal canisters, with an integral wad fitted at the base. One man at left cuts the tops for the canisters; two at centre form the outside round wooden and metal mandrels, at a bench in front of a currently unused furnace fireplace. The bench has a wad and shot package exposed to view in the near right corner. Another man at right appears to be lead-soldering the canister joints and one seated in the background is packing the finished canisters, each holding three shot packets above the wad. Many of the tools on racks round the walls have metal parts and it appears not to be workshop in which gunpowder itself is handled. The Royal Laboratory at Woolwich was constructed in 1696 for the purpose of manufacturing ammunition, fuses and gunpowder. It was formally renamed the Royal Arsenal in 1805. This is one of 11 drawings of which the numbers are non-sequential owing to the different boxes in which they are stored (by mount size): PAH4071-72, PAI0744-46, PAI7701-03, PAJ2303 and PAJ2312. Four, including this one, were reproduced as a double-page spread in the 'Illustrated London News' of 1 January 1916, pp. 14-15, as having recently appeared at auction by Messrs Hodgsons' and been bought by the ILN for that purpose. This makes it likely that they were later given to the NMM by Sir Bruce Ingram, managing proprietor and editor of the ILN and an early supporter of the Museum. It has been suggested they are by Gamaliel Massiot, an obscure artist of probably Huguenot French ancestry who was drawing master at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich from 1744 to 1768, after which he continued in a secondary position under Paul Sandby to shortly before his death early in 1782 (see further notes to PAI0746).